IBM has added new spaces to it’s community for businesses to develop “MySpace” like environments called Spaces.
New for this week are Usability and Design, and Yellow Connections. This joins the existing spaces including SaaSpace.com, Gaming, Messaging, Mashups, PHP, Ajax and other developer topics. What is good about this is that while IBM is hosting the spaces, the content is user/developer driven. Which means that “big brother” is not directing the traffic.
Here is a brief FAQ that describes what you can do and why it’s being done:
A space is a Web micro-site with one or more owners who can manage the content, presentation, and distribution with an easy-to-use interface. Spaces usually combine multiple ways to create or collaborate on content such as blogs, forums, wikis, file-sharing, video sharing, and so on. They may also provide ways to distribute the content via Web feeds such as Atom, or RSS.
Much more than a home page, a space allows the owners to communicate and connect with others. Each space is a potential community of its own: a following around an expert, a community of interest around a topic, a software project community, a user group community, and so on, based upon the wishes of its members.
Spaces can be implemented in a variety of ways. In developerWorks, each space is dynamically displayed through WebSphere Portal Server, with a number of portlets that contain different types of information.
developerWorks is providing a framework that enables users to create their own communities and integrate multiple collaboration and social networking tools into each one. Each community is put in the charge of its owners who can decide what content and what social networking tools they would like their community to use. Rather than focus on individual tools, we are looking at the holistic picture of enabling and growing communities. In our view, we are providing a way to encourage new communities and new leaders of such communities. We then support them with the tools that they need to connect, learn, and share with other members of the community. These new communities can embrace members from any combination of our worldwide population of over 5 million developers, who may share their views and interests. In addition, this new framework allows you to start with a single place for your community before your members divert to different forms of interaction and collaboration. Thus, on the same page, you can present information from many content and social networking tools: blogs, forums, articles, wikis, Web feeds, etc.
This framework allows community leaders to add the particular social networking tools they want to use. developerWorks already provides a range of such tools including blogs, forums, wikis, chat rooms, exchange, and Web feeds. We recognize that communities evolve in many different ways and have many different models for how they operate. We therefore want to put these choices in the hands of the community and its own leadership. The leadership of each space can thus choose according to how it thinks its community will interact and can change or evolve its community tool set as appropriate to the community’s ongoing needs. In addition to having diverse social networking tools, you can even pick and choose smaller units of information within these tools (e.g., a single blog entry rather than the entire blog), as well as export the information to your space in the form of Web feeds so that other users, communities, and Web sites can benefit. We treat each space as its own potential community, all within the overall developerWorks community. Each space can start small, gain membership over time, and grow into a sizeable community.
The features for developerWorks spaces will be spread across several releases. In the first release, we offer community leaders the ability to create and maintain topic-focused spaces (called “community topics”). A space can be owned by two or more registered developerWorks members, who collaboratively maintain the content and layout of the space. They decide on the content they would like to include, and, using a variety of portlets, present this information in a layout of their choosing. They can aggregate content from any combination of sources: developerWorks, IBM, or the Web. Additionally, they can create content in blogs, forums, wikis, and more. Each social networking tool is presented inside a portlet that can be placed or moved around the layout of a space. A space owner can edit the space from any Web browser. To start, they drag and drop portlets from a palette onto the page itself. They can then edit the contents of each portlet.
The purpose of developerWorks spaces and that of our zones is slightly different. Our zones are managed by our staff; they have well-defined processes for how content is created and managed, content marketing and promotion processes, well-defined site navigation, and most significantly, the official backing of IBM. Since our spaces can be created by any mix of members, who may or may not be from IBM, they are not the same as our zones. A space is a more generic concept that allows content integration as well as distributed ownership and guidance. To enable this distributed ownership, we provide easy-to-use tools to create and maintain spaces which do not require specific technical skills beyond using a Web browser. We envision our spaces growing beyond the scenario of topics into other community models, based on each community’s needs and supported by more tools that enable these communities to gather and interact.
The biggest benefit to users is the ability to create their own communities and share with our worldwide membership. This comes in the form of intuitive and easy-to-use tools that do not require technical knowledge and are supported by our own staff.
At this preview stage (April 2007), we are carefully scaling our system because of the large number of permutations for what members can put into spaces and the new ideas and processes it will involve. With that in mind, we are at this time open to creating new spaces around technology topics managed by groups of users. Each group can apply for a space through our Web site. We are looking for areas that will grow into successful community topics, and therefore recommend that groups put thought and purpose behind their ideas before filling out an application. The initial list of community topics that we released in mid-April is below. We have not yet determined if or when anyone will be able to create a space instantaneously.
