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There are a couple of upcoming events scheduled for August 14/15th in Boston which some members of the core Elgg team will be attending.
Firstly, Elgg is one of the sponsors of the Social Technology and Education conference being held at Harvard University, Cambridge. The conference has the following themes and is looking for speakers:
- A Survey of Social Tools and How They Work (Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Flickr, Elgg, etc)
- Case Studies: Social Networks in Schools
- Behavior Management Issues: acceptable use policies, privacy, vandalism, appropriate content, security and more
- Panel: "Co-opt or Compete?" Should schools embrace commercial tools or build their own infrastructure?
- Creating Communities of Learning: How to use tools to advance educational goals
- Technology for Teachers: A session explaining the basic technology terms that will help teachers who want to set up social tools without calling in computer support
Then, on the back of this conference, there is going to be an ElggCamp Boston, so, if you are interested in Elgg, please sign up and come along.
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If you are using Elgg within higher education, could you help us gather some stats by taking a minute to fill in this survey. Thanks.
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 I've been sent some information about an ElggCamp that is happening in Paris at La cantine on June 13th. There is a growing community of Elgg developers, designers and adopters in France and this ElggCamp will provide an opportunity for those interested in Elgg, based in the Paris region, to meet and share experiences/projects. For more information head over to the event site http://elgg.elgg.fr/pg/groups/623/projet-elggcamp/.
If you are interested in, or are, arranging an ElggCamp and would like it mentioned on this blog, send over any details (dave elgg com).
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 The Elgg project continues to grow month on month. This is evident in the volume of downloads, the number of plugins being contributed and the new networks opening daily. To help us continue developing the Elgg project we are in the final stages of agreeing a second round of investment. On the back of Elgg's continued growth, the forthcoming Elgg.com service and high demand for custom networks, confidence in Elgg is high.
We plan on using this injection of capital to expand the technical team and develop a formal partner program to provide commercial support services, training and accreditation to development partners building networks on Elgg. We see strong demand for Elgg networks and are keen to afford supporters and members of the Elgg community with enhanced capability to market their services and promote Elgg as the preferred option for the development of social platforms, both internal and external.
We are delighted to announce that Leonard Lin will be joining the Elgg team on a consultancy basis to advise, and work, on Elgg scaling, authentication methods, code efficiency and direction. Leonard's vast experience gained through the development of upcoming.org, then as a senior hacker at Yahoo and recently as part of the Obama online team will be invaluable to the Elgg project.
The Elgg project is heading into a new phase which we are all very excited about.
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This week one of our servers suffered a fatal hardware failure which resulted in 24 hours of downtime for the Elgg community site and SVN as we built a new server, configured the required software and restored all data from backup. We are still tweaking the new set up in order to get it running as effectively as possible so there may be the odd wrinkle as this work continues. Thanks to the Elgg community for your patience this week, we appreciate it.
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April has seen a host of new Elgg powered sites emerge and the number of plugins contributed by members of the community has risen to an impressive 589. Thank you to everyone who is taking the time to share their work and help improve Elgg.
Here are a couple of the new Elgg powered networks (If you’d like your network featured, please get in touch):
Read more
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If you’re a fan of the Elgg project and want to join our team, here are a few vacancies:
- System administrator
- Interface developer - must have an eye for detail and be experienced in PHP/Javascript/Ajax
- Experienced PHP developers – contract, part-time and full-time
- Business development manager - must have a track record of working with web based services
As we are a distributed team, remote working is not a problem.
If you are interested in any of these positions, please send an email, with your resume and covering letter to Dave Tosh (dave elgg com). If you are applying for the Interface developer position or one of the PHP developer roles, please include links to examples of your work.
We’re also seeking organizations, groups and individuals who would like to join the Elgg affiliate program. If you provide Elgg services and would like to find out more, get in touch dave elgg com.
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 It is always great to see people picking up Elgg and applying it to their own niche. The fascinating thing about online communities is the diversity, everyone has something different they are into and software like Elgg can help those groups create a vibrant online community.
Elgg 1.5 has been downloaded tens of thousands of times over the past three weeks, since release. With new networks springing up every day, here are a small sample.
Random:
- Classicrods - for classic car enthusiasts.
- Hapas - a community to share your individual stories about the multiracial Asian experience through words, pictures, videos, and collaboration.
- RailRefund - a space for disgruntled commuters.
- The Lab - a network for models and clients.
- Skydiving - a site for German skydivers.
- pbop.de - another German network, not really sure what it is about but it looks fun.
- MaestroZone - connect and share with other musicians in the world.
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- theatregig - a free online community that connects theatre people in community, regional, academic and professional theatre – worldwide.
- Chukkest - is the exclusive online social network designed for those who love Polo ponies.
Education:
- c41pt.net - a Social Learning Network for Learning Professionals to discuss the use of social media and social learning.
- uTicked - social bookmarking for teachers.
- Université de Montréal - a Université de Montréal network.
- CMUOnet - a fully functional social networking system, connecting CMUO learners and creating communities of learning.
Professional:
One of the fastest growing areas of Elgg adoption is for company Intranets, to help improve internal communication. As most are behind a firewall, there are no links to those networks. This is a space I think we are going to see expand over the coming year and for which Elgg is well positioned to make inroads. There are options such as SocialText, Jive and Yammer in the space already, however, Elgg brings a rich set of features to the mix and a growing open source community, making it an attractive option.
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 Elgg v1.5 has left the building. This release has a host of new features, improved performance and a brand new theme. We have also updated the Elgg website to coincide with the new release. The about page contains a series of new screenshots.
We would like to say thanks to Kam Low, Brett Profitt, Cash Costello, Steve O'Conner, Kevin Jardine and Milan Magudia for taking the time to help us test this latest release as well as everyone else in the community who reported bugs and suggested fixes.
If you would like to discuss the new release, find plugins and share your experience with other Elgg users, check out the upgraded Elgg community.
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 I recently found out that Elgg was being used at Harvard, so I got in touch with the course organisers and asked them a few questions. They were kind enough to get back to me with some answers.
A couple of the interesting points:
“we decided to abandon the LMS and run the course entirely in Elgg” and “I was surprised to read in the final evaluations how much more our students liked Elgg over Facebook.”
Interesting stuff!
Read more
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