Ben Werdmuller

Johannes Ernst just put me to shame by writing this blog post while sitting next to me at Elgg Camp San Francisco:

[...] But there’s a stronger undertone from speaker after speaker talking about their projects. It’s about how the community wants and needs to own and control their social network (instead of just merely having a little section inside a worldwide social network). And how the community wouldn’t be as strong if they couldn’t. About the community needing to evolve the communication tools in parallel to how the community evolves. About how it is almost impossible to “work together” with others on a general-purpose site like Facebook, and how even high school students automatically switch to their school social network when attempting to get something done.

You can read the whole post here.

I spoke a little about ensuring the longevity of communities, which is something I’ve begun to think about in a general context: if you’ve established a community site and attracted a solid social network of people, how do you ensure that the community remains vibrant in six months, or three years, or a decade from now? How do you make sure, to put it bluntly, that maintaining a community remains worth your time?

In the same way that a community site augments the social experience for a network of people, I’m interested in explicit market features that augment the online social experience. For example, open source communities like the Elgg community itself: what if the Elgg ecosystem could crowdfund features and plugins?

This also speaks to community ownership. Why monetize a community using AdSense – content piped in from third parties outside the community, which may or may not be relevant but certainly are less passionate about the community’s topic – when you could empower the community to do this for itself? Why not allow online communities to be truly self-sustainable?

It’s been an interesting day, and I’m looking forward to talking to people afterwards. I’ve set up a collaborative latakoo How I Fly site here, for participants to collaboratively share video footage of the event.

A long time (almost three years) ago now, I worked on an open source project called Elgg, which I also co-founded. It was vastly more popular than we had anticipated – from a small start in education, the community pulled it in all kinds of amazing directions – but after almost six years working on it, I decided to move onto other things. It’s currently being run by Brett Profitt, who I have a lot of respect for. Elgg is still widely used as a social platform for niche communities, social intranets, learning platforms and all kinds of things, not least because the community continues to inject it with new life (and new features).

When Brett let me know about ElggCamp San Francisco, I was delighted. It looks great: the attendee list is already impressive, and tickets are cheap – possibly the best-value event about online communities you’ll attend in the vicinity of Silicon Valley, both in terms of price and the professional experience that’ll be under one roof. I’m looking forward to both the talks and the networking afterwards, and if Brett and co are half as professional as they have been with managing Elgg itself, it will be a great day. Buy tickets here.

Meanwhile, latakoo, my current company, is making video management dramatically easier. We’ll be at SXSW Interactive. Find us on Stand 308 at the trade show next week, or book some office hours to talk to me one-on-one.

Elgg logo credits: the top two were by me, the learning landscape logo was by Sonia Virdi, and the bottom was by Pete Harris. You can tell when we brought real designers in.

Congratulations to Brett, Cash, Evan and the Elgg community on the release of Elgg 1.8.0. I know that a lot of hard work has gone into this release, and it’s the first major departure from the architecture that was set out in Elgg 1.0 almost exactly three years ago.

One of the real benefits of releasing the product under an open source license – something I consistently fought for throughout my involvement in the project – is that it can keep going beyond its original team or sponsoring company. I’m really impressed with what Brett has done to turbo-boost the community. He’s a super-smart guy, the community is thriving, and I’m looking forward to building sites on the revised platform.

Curverider, the company I founded with Dave Tosh, has been acquired by Thematic Networks. From their press release:

"Many of the tools and communication patterns traditionally found in popular social media are already starting to play a valuable role in the corporate environment; for example for promoting internal and external collaboration, or delivering a more engaging e-learning experience to employees” said Ken Yeadon, Chief Executive of Thematic Networks. “Curverider brings a strong suite of social tools, which, together with its web-based Elgg.com platform, enables Thematic Networks to offer clients a broader range of social publishing and e-learning solutions, deployed either on-site or delivered via the web as a turnkey service."

Elgg itself will be developed by a non-profit foundation run by Brett Profitt, who has been acting as lead developer for the past 18 months or so. From the post over on the Elgg site, it sounds like Dave will leave the project, leaving it in the hands of Brett along with Cash Costello, who has long been a prolific contributor.

I’m excited to see where they take it. Although I left Curverider and Elgg before he joined, from everything I know, Brett is a safe pair of hands. It’s too early to say what the Foundation will look like, but they’ll certainly be needing donations and supporters. As the post on the Elgg site says, get in touch with Brett at brett@elgg.org if you want to help. There’s also a thread on the Elgg Community over here.

That blast-from-the-past Classic Elgg homepage screenshot was released under a Creative Commons license by Kevin Jarrett.

Note: As of 2011, this is no longer true.

Enough people have asked me about this over the last year, that I thought I’d write a little more about why I don’t do social networking work.

Most regular readers will be aware that I co-founded Elgg, the open source social networking framework. If you weren’t, it’s not hard to work out: my last name is Werdmuller von Elgg, and my work centers around the open web. In fact, Elgg is so named because I had bought the domain name elgg.net for my personal email, and didn’t have anything to put there. When Dave Tosh and I conceived of the project, it seemed easier to put it there than anywhere else. (It’s a great domain name: short, memorable and not immediately definable.)

I also co-founded Curverider, the company created to provide commercial Elgg support, which allowed us to build it into the project it is today: an enormously popular social networking platform used by organizations like the WWF and the World Bank.

For various reasons, I chose to leave Elgg and Curverider last year to go freelance and work on some of my own projects. (The last version I was involved with in any way was 1.5 – since then I haven’t been privy to development decisions or involved in the process.) Because of this prior association, however, people still ask me about working on social networking projects all the time – whether that’s a distributed social network, a new platform, or an Elgg-based site.

My answer is always the same: I’d love to, but I can’t.

As you’d expect for a founder, I’m a shareholder in Curverider. As part of this, I am forbidden from competing with the company’s business (which, of course, is social networking – a rapidly growing portion of the entire software market, but that’s a conversation for another time). As a result, I don’t work on social networking platforms, and I’m unable to provide Elgg services, despite it being an open source framework. A process exists for me to obtain an exception for potentially competing products, but this would involve divulging the project and business model, which I don’t believe is an ethical way to treat a consultancy client’s information. So I don’t do it.

Of course, I’m available for web strategy advice, writing opportunities and development services in a range of other areas, including publishing, e-learning and mobile content. I’m also developing a few new ideas that you should see in action soon. As ever, if you’d like my feedback, please feel free to get in touch.

Congratulations are in order for the Curverider folks: over on the Elgg blog, Dave’s announced a new round of funding for the company. Additionally, Leonard Lin is working with the team on a consultancy basis.

Although I left to pursue other projects last month, Elgg is close to my heart. I headed technical direction through Elgg version 1.5 (the most recently-released version), co-founded both Elgg and Curverider, was co-author of Elgg’s vision and ethos, and remain a major shareholder in Curverider. As a result I’m absolutely delighted about this state of affairs, which should allow the project to realise its commercial and technical ambitions.

Update: Interested in what I’m doing now? Check out my about page.

I have a major announcement to make:

I co-founded Elgg with Dave Tosh five years ago, and it’s been a heck of a ride. I’ve been immensely proud of what we’ve been able to achieve, not least establishing the most popular open source social networking platform, helping establish the first social network to run campus-wide at a university, and developing a commercial business with a first-class team of brilliantly intelligent, creative people. Each major milestone has been both a thrill and an honour.

However, I have decided that the time has come to move onto other projects. As of Wednesday, April 15th, I’ll no longer be part of Curverider or the core Elgg team. I’m immensely excited about my next projects, and announcements will be made about these later in the year – it’s too early to talk about them now, but I intend to continue pushing the envelope of what’s possible on the Web. I’ll also be providing expert advice to organizations who want to create excellent Web-based services.

I’m also very excited about Elgg’s future plans. I’m very proud of the team we’ve created, and the platform is about to enter its own new era. Keep an eye on Elgg.com.

Elgg 1.5 was released today. There’s an official post over at news.elgg.org, but I wanted to make a note of it here too. This is the longest we’ve taken over a release since 1.0, and there are almost eight hundred significant engine changes since the previous version. More than one person has remarked to me (while testing the release candidates) that it feels more like a version 2.0.

Marcus points out:

Elgg 1.5 has loads of new functionality – both visible and under the hood. There’s a brand new theme and dashboard, groups are more powerful, and the whole core has been made much much much faster.

The notifications engine is another feature worth highlighting: you can subscribe to the content produced by any of your friends, or any group you’re a member of, and have it delivered using the method of your choice. Out of the box that might be email or internal messaging, but developers can add new notification methods, and Curverider offers a commercial SMS service.

This release makes Elgg particularly suitable for professional social networking, and pushes the software well ahead in its field. And there’s more to come.

See the official Elgg site to download the software or read more.

Since we started Elgg, I’ve always kept a very open philosophy about how the software should work. From the human perspective, we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, with an easy-to-use interface and innards that allowed you to do very technical things (like, in Elgg 0.x, republishing aggregated RSS) with very little knowhow. From the organizational perspective, we didn’t want there to be a barrier to entry; we released it under the GNU Public License and allowed anyone to download and install it for free. And technically, we allowed anyone to augment, extend and replace its functionality, maintained an open architecture and embraced technologies like FOAF, RSS and so on.

That was five years ago. The world is only now beginning to catch up.

The Silicon Valley Web community is buzzing with “open” ideas: data portability, the open stack, the open mesh, OpenID, OAuth, and so on. There have been two Data Sharing Summits, a bunch of Identity Workshops, and efforts are crystallizing around open activity streams, contacts sharing, and virtually anything else you might want to transfer between web applications. David Recordon, co-creator of OpenID and all-round cheerleader for openness, has predicted that Facebook won’t be a walled garden by 2010.

This is fantastic stuff, which I intend to get even more involved with as the year progresses. Good work is happening all round, and even sleepy behemoths like Microsoft are beginning to take notice.

What worries me slightly is that the work is centered around the Silicon Valley community, and within that is largely built with public-facing commercial websites in mind. Those sites (like Digg, MySpace, the SixApart properties and so on) are awesome without a doubt, but the potential of social technologies falls well beyond the commercial web. People are beginning to use them on intranets, within universities, across governmental departments and so on – places that could use the same approaches, but need to be represented in the discussions.

Their exclusion is not the fault of the people producing the standards and doing this great work; they’re very happily welcoming anyone with a productive contribution to the table. Instead, it falls to those organizations to realize what they’re missing out on and begin to pay more attention to cutting edge technology. The Obama administration is certainly waking up to this, but others – notably the UK government – are extremely reticent to embrace anything open at all.

The technology is falling into place to allow for an open, transparent, knowledge-orientated economy. Now it’s time to look at what else is needed.

There are a couple of jobs advertised on Elgg.com – if you’re an excellent PHP developer, Linux system administrator or business development manager with experience in social media, we’d like to hear from you.