The Search for Social Interaction Tools

Spent most of the last couple of days trying out ELGG. For those of you who have never heard of it, ELGG is an 'open source social networking engine'. We are looking at different tools that will allow various groups of users to interact. The eventual aim is to find a suitable tool that will allow the creation of communities of practice, something along the lines of our current online ICT coordinators network. This particular community has been developed in Moodle over several years, and has worked well for us. However we now feel that there are better tools out there for the social interaction that we require.

We have also gone back to look at Joomla for developing our web presence, and 'plugging in' suitable interactive tools. It's interesting to note that a popular social interaction plugin for Joomla, which has everything we need, doesn't have a moderation tool which would be essential to building up an open community that we require. We've emailed the company to see if this is something that is in development.

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