SocialTech:

This week, a bunch of us from the Emerge project were invited to contribute to the OSS Watch expert workshop on profiling communities. I was asked to present, and as part of my talk looked at the current state of Open Source social networking platforms and tools. I'm hoping to follow up with an evaluation matrix of the platforms, but in the meantime, I'm happy to pass on brief details of the sites and services I looked at. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means - I'm happy to report that there is plenty of choice if you are looking to invest time, energy and resources in using open source tools. This list represents examples of what's currently available & is not an endorsement of any particular product or company :)

Open Source Social Networking Platforms

All in one solutions for community hosting, providing user profiles, tools sets & supporting collaborative activity.

AROUNDMe http://www.barnraiser.org/

Developed by Barnraiser a Swedish based registered not-for-profit organisation. AROUNDMe is suite of three social tools, designed to help users create their own OpenID-based services and tools for individuals and groups.

Elgg http://elgg.org/

Social networking engine Elgg coming soon in two flavors - Classic Elgg and the soon to be released Elgg 1.0. Elgg, developed by the UK-based company Curverider.

Dolphin 6.1 http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/

One of a suite of tools from Australian based company BoonEx, who offer hosted options. A test platform is available at http://www.boonex.us/

Insoshi http://portal.insoshi.com/

US-based Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen's company, project and product Inoshi. The Insoshi open-source social networking platform grew out of RailsSpace.

LovdbyLess http://lovdbyless.com/

Like Insoshi, Lovdbyess is built with ruby on rails, by US-based developer team Less Everything, to provide a free, open source basic social network platform that additional specific functionality can be added to.

Mahara http://www.mahara.org/

E-portfolio social networking software developed for the education community, and including a résumé builder/digital CV. The Mahara project is based in New Zealand, with partner organisations in Japan and the UK.

Open Source Social News

Stand alone and built to work with existing content management platforms, these tools allow users to share content published online, and comment on there own or others contributions.

Drupaligg http://drupaligg.com

A Digg clone built over Drupal

Newscloud http://www.newscloud.com

Newscloud is an OS Media Platform, designed to support communities around news and discussion. Information about downloading and developing can be found here.