REALNEO

I am the Systems Engineer on the REALNEO project, an initiative to create Virtual Communities in the Northeast Ohio area to stimulate collaboration in business, the arts, social sciences, advanced technology, and many other special interest areas. The following is a synopsis of REALNEO that I wrote for a recent presentation:

REALNEO – A Northeast Ohio “Virtual Community Center”

Imagine a Northeast Ohio Virtual Community Center serving as a catalyst for innovation and entrepreneurship. This Center would have a Public Area where news, articles, ideas, and opinions could be shared among a general audience. The Center would also be comprised of a number of Private Conference Areas where individuals sharing a common field of interest could collaborate. Membership in each Private Conference Area could be regulated by a Moderator, who would apply whatever criteria the Special-Interest Community had established for their Private Conference Area. Thus, the Community Center would provide a rich array of public and private sectors where productive networking and collaboration could take place in an environment independent of time and space. The environments available for collaborative activities would include:

Collaborative Books provide a useful format for items such as Proposals, Manuals, Mission Statements, and Frequently Asked Questions. Books are created by administrators and include features such as:

A nested hierarchical structure of documents in which the content can be organized into chapters, sections, etc.

Book pages contain a log message field which helps your users understand the motivation behind an edit of a book page.

Any comments attached to those relevant posts which you designate as book pages will also be transported into your book. This is a great feature, since much wisdom is shared via comments.

Blogs allow registered users to maintain a personal weblog on site. Blogs can be seen as a means of personal knowledge publishing, a place for researchers or enthusiasts to build and share knowledge about their interests. In project oriented sites, Blogs can serve as a workspace for project members to post ideas for commenting by others in a group.

News Aggregator – provides a means for reading and blogging news from other sites. Thousands of sites, especially news sites, trade publications, and weblogs, syndicate their most recent site content for others to display. The syndicated content always includes titles, also known as headlines, for the newest published stories. Each headline acts as a direct link to the stories on the remote site.

Content syndication - REALNEO site content can be exported in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a "News Aggregator" browse REALNEO site content.

Comments - Users can post comments to discuss a forum topic, weblog post, story, collaborative book page, etc. An administrator can give comment permissions to user groups.

Discussion Forums – Provide an online discussion based community. This empowers individual users by giving them a unique voice. Forums also provide an excellent means for users to become involved in a project, since the whole revision process of projects and information are shown. The environment is controlled by administrator(s) so that comments and updates are constructive and relevant to the task at hand.

Locale or internationalization support – REALNEO provides a framework to setup a multi-lingual web site, or to overwrite the default English texts. Thus, people less comfortable with English than with their native language may be able to see site content in their mother tongue.

Polls - Enable Administrators and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages. Thus, it is possible to measure user community sentiment on organizations, plans, projects, articles, or issues.