Forum OpenACS Q&A: Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic?

1: Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic?

Posted by Claudio Pasolini on 03/16/02 10:42 AM

Hi everybody,
do you know if there is some Community Network already using OpenACS or ACS classic?

I would try to convince a workgroup representing more than 20 important Italian cities to use OpenACS for building a portal for delivering their services to the citizens.

I'm not much confident, because the general belief is that we should go for Microsoft or Java as the only viable solutions, but a reference to real cases woul greatly help.

Thank You

2: Response to Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic? (response to 1)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 03/16/02 08:07 PM

Hi Claudio, I think the best software for a community is OpenACS, because it was conceived from the begining to build communities, purpouseful communities! I will give you a couple of links that I'm shure that will help you, please read the Etzioni article about CMC, it will help you a lot, most of the requirements are met by openacs 4.5, also check out the Study cases that aD has and the ASJ, maybe you will find interesting things in wimpy point at aD too.

Etzioni CMC
WP
WP
Case studies
ASJ

And if you can find more info about AIESEC.net that aD did, it will help you a lot, maybe Malte know more about this?, if not, ask me again because the IT directory at AIESEC at that time is my friend here in Guatemala.

This stuff has helped me a lot in sales things... =)

And about the java, it doesn't make sense if you want rapid development, and about the MS stuff, you know, there is a lot of docs out there against them and their technology. I think your best point to convince is to show the community stuff that no system else has.

3: Response to Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic? (response to 1)

Posted by David Geilhufe on 03/16/02 08:56 PM

Probably the community networking implementation with the most promise (i.e. most used by the community) is done by a group in East Palo Alto, CA called PluggedIn. You can see their beta at http://community.pluggedin.org/ (ACS 4.x)

The other really good community networking implementation of ACS is http://www.camfieldestates.net/ (ACS 3.x)

Neither of these sites uses OACS... I guess they both had an extra $20k lying around that they wanted to give to oracle. Actually they got their licenses donated, but that means that other organizations can't just borrow their code.

I've been working on Andrew Cohill at the Association for Community Networking (www.afcn.org) to see if we can put together a coalition of folks willing to build a "community network in a box" based on OACS. Any organization could download the software and get up and running quickly.

If you are looking more for an example of a metro network for city governent service delivery (pay parking tickets, etc.), I don't know of any good ACS examples.

The closest one is www.developmentgateway.org (ACS4), which is a good example of a major organization (the World Bank) selecting a tool (ACS) that can be used to service multiple nodes (countries). The same model would work for the Italian cities. The workgroup would develop the core software, and each city can implement, extend and customize according to their needs.

I think the benefits of something like OACS is:

1) Cost of development & maintainence is generally a little lower. You can subtract out the license fees for software, though costs for development, training, support, etc. are the same.

2) The software can be distributed to other cities (Italian & otherwise) without blockages.

3) Once there is a significant installed base, the process of upgrading and extending the application to additional functionality areas is cheap, fast and innovative.

For example, a US city might adopt the software and create an application that helps citizens figure out when their streets are going to be repaired. The Italian cities that initiated the project, would be able to adopt that innovation, since they laid out the technical groundwork for the system. It might be as easy as simply installing a new package into their OACS installation.

Good luck on the sell, I think a really compelling case can be made.

4: Response to Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic? (response to 1)

Posted by Claudio Pasolini on 03/17/02 05:35 PM

Thank You all for the links and the suggestions. Hope this helps.

5: aplaws (response to 1)

Posted by Tapiwa Sibanda on 03/18/02 10:56 AM

There is already a similar effort underway in the UK. This is the Accessible and Personalised Local Authority Web Sites by aD and some other partners including Oracle, Sun,and half a dozend local authorities.

According to the site, their goals are to

develop a standardised model for local authority websites with the philosophy that a citizen should only need to access one website when transacting with government, whether this be local, regional or national. This standardised model will be a set of standards, as well as a deliverable software system using these standards ...

The product list which is supposed to be available for download off their site in March 2002 (not sure how aD takeover affects this), will include

system and architecture
content and metadata

The system is based on ACS (not sure which version), and will be opensourced.

6: Response to Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic? (response to 1)

Posted by Claudio Pasolini on 03/19/02 01:58 PM

Tapiwa,

I checked the APLAWS site and it is very interesting, but why
NETCRAFT tells me that it is a Microsoft IIS + Windows NT site?

7: Response to Community Network using OpenACS or ACS classic? (response to 1)

Posted by Matthew Burke on 03/19/02 03:45 PM

<blockquote>> but why NETCRAFT tells me that it is a Microsoft IIS + Windows NT site?
</blockquote>

probably for the same reason that www.dotlrn.org is running Apache <g>