• Featured Option – Grow the Team / Recruit 5 friends – Button says “Recruit Friends” – grow the volunteer database
• Spread the word / Send a letter to the press – Button says “Speak Out”, submit to external blogs or simply social bookmarking
• Go door-to-door – Button says “Help Out” – upcoming events, create an event
• Attend an Event – Button says “Join”, schedule, manage, and promote events
• Make Phone Calls – Button says “Make Calls”
• Blogging – blog on the system
• Join a Group – discussion groups, launch user groups along issue or geographic lines, let users create and manage their own user groups,
• Featured content will target campaigns and programs to interested and motivated groups

We aim to motivate members to carry actions that matter with this social points system, the points per section will need to be displayed in the sidebar. The action center and online community tools set the standard for volunteers engagement and participatory content. This powerful suite of community content generation and social networking tools facilitate a range of real-time person-to-person activities, from user profiles to blogs to online forums, that will leave your site visitors with the feeling that your online community is richly alive with content and commitment.

In closing

We need drive people to engage with the system. An action center helps people to find the tools available on the system… Feedback most welcome!

• Logged in user would like to create an event
• User will click a menu item in top bar “My Events”, this menu item should drop down with the following items displayed:
  • Create an Event
  • Find Events
  • Manage Events
  • Attend Events
• The next step is to bring up a landing page for the events component
  • A good example of an events list page is facebook events
• When Events dashboard loads you will see a the following:
  • Directory listing of upcoming events in your area
  • Featured events
  • Create an Event big button
  • Browse Events – general browsing tool
  • Search events box
  • Export Events (Google, iCal or Outlook)
• The events component should have a Sidebar Widget always visible

So now I have described the overview of the events module lets drill down into a bit more detail per page, see below.

Events Listings / Browse Events

• Filter mechanism to see events in your neighbourhood
  • By area
  • By Date
  • By Type
• General listing of all upcoming events is the default display when browsing events, details displayed:
  • Date
  • Title
  • Tagline
  • Hosted by
  • Type
  • Where
  • When
  • Your RSVP
• Friend’s / Neighbour’s Events
  • Date
  • Title
  • Tagline
  • Hosted by
  • Friends Attending
  • Type
  • Where
  • When
  • Your RSVP

Event Invites

• Users can send an invite message via system and system sends notification email with the following details:
  • Title
  • Day of week, Month, Date, Time at Venue, Geographic Location
  • Invite by Member Name (who invited me)
  • RSVP message (optional)
  • Will you attend – Yes, No, Maybe?
  • Remove from my events
• Once selection has been made then a confirmation message should display to confirm the user’s attendance

Single Events Page

• Event Info
• Title/Event Name:
• Tagline:
• Host:
• Type: Go-door-todoor, hand out leaflets, house meetings,
• Description:
• Network becomes “Geographic Location”
• Time and Place
• Start Time:
• End Time:
• Location:
• Street:
• City/Town:
• Contact Info
• Contact Person:
• Phone:
• Email Address:
• Confirmed Guests should display in a section
• Discussion “Wall”, RSVP message are posted to the “wall”
• Sidebar widgets
• Invite more people, earn points
• Remove from My Events
• Admins for event
• Your RSVP status

General Events Notes

• Admins to be able to create events and send to an entire network, BUT standard users will only be able to invite volunteers that belong to the same groups as them
• Events hosts need to be able to upload a list of actual attendees of the events, all members who attend will be able to score points for attending

In closing

I feel that the events module is a big must for just about any social network and could add huge value to everyone using buddypress! Please send me your feedback….

One of my essential daily tools is Gtalk or Google Talk. I use it to communicate with people in my own company, clients, contractors, suppliers and just about anyone who uses it. Gmail allows you to do two things directly from your browser:

• Instant messaging
• Gmail notifications

I would like to see a component created for BuddyPress that allows users to connect and communicate via a similar browser chat to Gmail. I remember when facebook launched their chat facility it really opened up a new avenue of communication. Suddenly you could chat to whoever was online in real-time.

In South Africa a mobile chat system called MXit became very popular and as noted below started out using Jabber to power its discussion platform, read more:

Until February 2008, the MXit service was backed by ejabberd, an open source instant messaging server that is based on the open standard Jabber. MXit replaced ejabberd with a new self-developed, high scalability software core to assure continual growth and innovation requirements can be met. Although external Jabber clients were originally allowed to connect to the MXit backed servers, this had to be discontinued due to instability induced by unreliable and untrustworthy sites.

I have mentioned that we are looking developing a social network for a political party, we need an IM bp-component to improve information sharing. Some of the people involved in the volunteer programs are in areas where people don’t have internet in their homes, but they almost everyone has a mobile phone. Volunteers will need to be able to access the social networking site and gain access to relevant geographic information, examples:

• Events in their area
• Volunteers located near by
• Contact details of key people involved

There are PHP libraries like Lightr, which is in Alpha, or xmpphp, which seems to be the better option. These libraries could allow us to integrate BuddyPress with a Jabber server. Some things I have noted from my research:

• It would seem like eJabberd is the more popular Jabber server to run, it has a high level of compliance with XMPP and supports distributed computing by clusterin, all quite appealing!
• JabberMixClient is a great GPL mobile client that could be used on mobile phones
• Still note sure what would work as a Jabber Client for inside BuddyPress, maybe JWChat will do the trick, it is open source so thats a definite plus….

Not much of a fundi on the topic of Jabber clients and servers, but would definitely like to hear back from people on what they think.