Request for Information: Social Networking Features

Context

The Agile Alliance is a non-profit organization chartered to help spread the adoption and expansion of Agile software development world wide. The Agile Alliance reaches an audience of thousands of members and many more contacts.

Our main site (www.agilealliance.org) currently acts as a channel to announce Agile events, provides some information about the organization, offers a repository of articles and pointers to further resources.

As it is currently, the Agile Alliance web site has limited facilities for “user-created content”, is mostly static and does not effectively engage our membership.

Objective

Our intent is to reach out to platform (or software) vendors or open-source providers to select the solution best suited to the needs of our members and our organization’s board.

Expectations

We expect vendors/providers to get back to us with a specific explanation of how the platform can meet our needs (not just a product brochure). Please tell us what features of your platform would help us do what we intend, and how.

Ideally, a “demo” site based on our current look and design (see Agile Alliance web site) would be created, either jointly with the provider’s help or by the provider.

Timeline

We would like to “re-launch” our main site by the time of our next conference in August. This conference (http://agile2009.agilealliance.org) will occur August 24-28 in Chicago, IL and we would like to introduce the 1,500 attendees to the new community platform.

Specifications

Users

  • paid individual members of the Agile Alliance
  • members of an organization having a corporate membership
  • non-member registered users of the site
  • anonymous visitors

The following “personas” or user roles may be relevant

  • agile practitioner within a corporation
  • manager looking for information on Agile
  • organizer of an Agile user group
  • consultant/author/speaker with Agile expertise
  • researchers in Agile-related CS fields

(See also the list Agile Conference personas, link below.)

  • We would prefer if a registered member of our site only had to create an account once, for all of the various features and services we will offer.
  • We would prefer if users could use something like Google Social to import user information without having to put information in yet another social networking system
  • Ideally the platform for “social networking” feature will therefore synchronize the site’s “membership” (all registered users of the site) with our member data. The primary process whereby member data is updated consists of registrations, renewals, and free membership given out to attendees of our yearly conference (typical attendance 1500+). We expect that the primary copy of our member data will be handled by a dedicated CRM platform similar to Salesforce.com. We are currently investigating the membership management application to move to but we do have member data (username and password) from our current site that we would like to have set up before launch.
  • We would prefer if there was a way to restrict the use of some features of the site to paid members and/or corporate Agile Alliance members. (Ability to create groups, add blogs to user profiles, etc)
  • We are interested in at least the following profile data for the social features of our site:
    • member’s geographical location
    • member’s topics of interest
    • member’s role in the community (practitioner, researcher, etc. as above)
  • We would like to provide members who are involved in organizing events with a way to create event information: event title, date, location, description and so on (searchable)
  • We would like to provide members with a way to create non-promotional content: articles, tutorials, etc.
  • We would like there to be a featured blog that pulls in (aggregates) blogs of our choice (e.g.: planet.mozilla.org)
  • We would like to provide members with blogs that are pulled from member profile pages
  • We would like to provide members with a way to rate other members’ content
  • Members should be able to create ‘sub-networks’ or groups that they manage and would have their own calendar of events. Other members could join the sub-groups. Sub-group administrators could email group recipients. These could be for special interest groups (Scrum, XP, Lean, Kanban, etc.) or for local Agile user groups.
  • It would be valuable if sub-groups could be “branded” by the administrator.
  • It would be valuable for user-created content to include content types beyond text messages: files, photos, videos, collaborative databases or spreadsheets
  • It would be extremely valuable if individual members, and subgroups if supported, could tailor the information presented to them when visiting the site (resp a subgroup’s page) based on criteria such as “events close to my location”, “articles matching my tags”, “events published by members of my group”, and so on.
  • We would prefer members to reach our site through agilealliance.org, and expect to host various sites at subdomains of agilealliance.org

Further information