Community Portals

collaboration portal

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, online social networks or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes.

Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chatrooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks.

Community Portals are also largely inter-accessible with users able to navigate from one portal to another. Universal features, such as the browsebar, and the portals template, allow for convenient browsing.

Two broad categorizations of portals are Horizontal portals (e.g. Yahoo) and Vertical portals (or vortals, focused on one functional area, e.g. salesforce.com).

Community Portals provide a Community Bulletin Board to find out what is happening; what tasks need to be done; what groups there are to join; share news about recent events or current activities; and collaborations:

  • A selected article and/or picture
  • Links into the main category for the topic and possibly subcategories
  • General info about the subject, or links thereto
  • Links to other portals (using templates) and for editors.
  • Links to specific articles or tasks
  • Collaboration of the week, month, etc.