Community building software? Diaspora, Crabgrass, Friendika, etc?

[Black_Sector]

So, we are looking into building a website for Occupy type projects, but we dont like organizing exclusively on facebook because of the excessive datamining and security threats. Of course nothing is 100% secure, but you can do better than Facebook!

It seems like nothing is perfect. Friendika has great features, but isnt very polished. Diaspora has a really nice polished look, but tags are no replacement for organized groups. They dont even have sub-profiles like Friendika has, though they are not all that useful on Friendika yet....Then there is crabgrass....Is it even in development? Its weird how starting a thread is building a new "page". It feels a little off to me, though it does seem like one option for building communities....If only there was better forums, or maybe if you could have OpenID or WebID for crabgrass so that you could log into PHPBB forums....or subscribe to threads and get updates to your diaspora profile or something.


Is there any other community building software that allows users to create their own groups? I suppose a forum with group extensions could work, but I was thinking something more along the lines of Facebook Groups, Tribe.net, Crabgrass, etc, etc.

Are there any other ones I dont know about that could work?

Anyone interested in helping out a good cause and offering some quick installation help or advice?

[Docaltmed]

If I were to build such a group, I would do it on Diaspora without a doubt. You don't have to use tags, just create the group as a user, people add it to their aspects.

[Black_Sector]

Its a major pain in the *** not having sub-profiles for that. That means a new email address for every single group, and logging in-out for moderation....Kind of sucks.

[Docaltmed]

I don't want to get all philosophical on you here, but there seems to be a bit of dissonance here. You are talking about centralized communications management of an essentially decentralized organization.

A communications structure which would be much more in tune with the operational structure would be one in which each group has it's own profile, with the profiles sharing aspects/data on an as-needed basis. No centralized management should be necessary.

Goes without saying that each group should be using its own pod.

[Black_Sector]

I really dont see how you came to that conclusion that I wanted something centralized. You somehow got the complete opposite conclusion from what I was saying.

It would be better if users could create groups, as opposed to users not being able to create groups. It would be better if groups could be managed by multiple users, as opposed to the group being another user in itself. There are several problems with each group being its own profile.

1. It makes it less egalitarian when you cannot have multiple moderators. Control of groups should be shared, which is not possible with Diaspora right now.
2. It makes it harder to moderate when you have to log out of your user profile to do so.
3. Using a new registration with email for each and every group is a pain in the ***.


But I really have no idea how you got from that to thinking that I wanted something centralized. I want users to be able to create groups, and Diaspora does not support that yet.