Public Online Communities
Online communities are beneficial to your business, service or product. Providing facilities for customers and potential customers to ask questions and gain answers is both a sales and a self-care tool. Part of the self-care aspect is that users of your product or service can provide support for other users of your product or service.
Communities are not just about forums, it’s about the complete experience: providing blogs, voting booths, image galleries, shared experiences and resources. Over time community content becomes a rich archive of knowledge and a valuable resource for existing and future customers.
Red2 provides community experiences which are tailored to meet the needs of your individual users and your individual goals for providing the service. Traditionally we have provided community experiences for gaming and travel services/products, as well as for general-purpose use.
Private Communities
Private communities can be the same as or so much more than their public counterparts. They can be based on either organization-to-member, or member-to-member dynamics. This can be as simple as workgroups within your organisation, customers, employees or volunteers. Any group which regularly exchanges communications is a candidate for a private community. This can be achieved using standard tools and functions to capture knowledge and nurture the participants.
The National Museums Online Learning Project (NMOLP) led by the Victoria and Albert Museum launch Creative Spaces, a social network that, for the first time, brings together the online collections of nine leading UK museums. Visitors are able to share their cultural passions through a variety of creative tools. A collection of inspirational films showcase how people, including Vivienne Westwood and Ian Hislop, are inspired by these museums’ collections. Red2 have been involved for the past year developing the peer-2-peer social network application for this innovative online platform that allows people to research and to share their passion around museums’ collections.
Museums and galleries involved are The British Museum, The Imperial War Museum, National Portrait Gallery, The Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Wallace Collection.
Users are able to fuel their cultural passions, searching and collecting items and adding them to their own notebooks. These digital notebooks are hosted at the site, and designed to be tools to support long life learners, designers, researchers and museum lovers of all ages.
Notebooks can be published, eliciting a wealth of feedback and collaboration. Users can also gather and create groups to discuss their interests, share ideas and open their research to a wider forum.
Red2 were tasked with building a sustainable peer-2-peer social network platform which could be deployed to the varied museum servers from *nix, Linux and Windows. The approach uses both open-source tools and bespoken development. Red2’s peering technology at the lower level is one of the first to implement cross platform replication in a live and challenging social media environment.