ESN Galaxy: a new approach for ESN online community

 Quick links:

• ESN Galaxy
• ESN Satellite

 Introduction

ESN Galaxy is meant to provide a possible solution to the current ESN on-line situation. Most of the section websites are not well built and they don’t offer enough services for the Erasmus students. Another important point is that the ESN on-line community, in spite of the ESN spirit, is an isolated community: within it no knowledge and/or practice is shared and this in turn produces two main disadvantages:

• sections spend resources to implement the same range of services for Erasmus students;
• information collected at the local level, useful to the whole network, is not shared and it is difficult to reach;

ESN Satellite: Up and running in 5 minutes!

Since the needs of every ESN section are similar, i.e. services and management instruments for the whole community are required, re-implementing the same tools in every website is a loss of time; one of the final aim, thus, is to build a website template with a set of instruments and content management tools that is ready to use and that the sections can download and install in their web spaces in few minutes.

The template will be also useful for all the community living inside the ESN Galaxy like Working Groups, Organisational Committees of AGMs or National Platforms, Fun(d)raisers Coordination, Alumni Community, etc…

Giving a look around the current ESN websites we can have an idea about what kinds of tools an ESN web site needs. Just to point out some of them an ESN web site should provide:

• Content Managing System to easily publish and maintain static content;
• Local Infocentre to upload and share useful documents;
• Events System to publish events and easily manage online subscription;
• Members/Card Owners Registration;
• Housing and Hospitality System to help Erasmus students to find a place or simply hospitality in other ESN members’ house;
• Job Offers System to help Erasmus to find a job in the host country;
• Buddy System to implement the Students Helping Students ESN principle;
• Mailing Lists to reach ESN members;
• Forums, Photo Gallery, Chat, etc… to empower the sense of community through ESN website members.

For those sections that already have a website and don’t want to change it losing the job done, it will be possible to use only the ESN Satellite tools they need to. All the tools, in fact, will be implemented as separate components and could be used in stand alone mode just like a plug-in.

ESN Galaxy: Share your life!

Every ESN website mainly contains two kind of information:

• Community Information: every kind of content that makes the community stronger (forums, guestbook, photos, etc…);
• Helpful Information: useful information with helping purpose (housing system, job offer, info about the host city, etc… ).

A significant part of the helpful information could be really useful also outside the local contest: just think about an ESN member looking for an house in a new city or a group of ESNrs that wants to have some information about ESN events of a city they are planning to go to.

A way to achieve this is to share this kind of information by collecting it at the local level. In this way the local sections become a source of helpful and useful information for the whole network in sharing events, house and job offers, mentors and so forth.

All the collected information will be kept, in a centralised way, in the esn.org databases with several strong benefits for all the network, such as:

• local websites become a source of knowledge and information for the whole network;
• it will be possible to have an European wide search through the ESN resources;
• information collected could be used for statistic proposes;
• having a huge amount of useful information could help in searching for sponsorship/partnership.

ESN Identity: Be unique!

The third aim of ESN Galaxy is to empower the sense of community by making the network stronger. Now, in fact, the different ESN online communities are like islands in the ocean. If is important to share useful helping information it is, maybe, even more crucial to foster the contact among the members of the network.

To allow this, an ESN member could access all the websites of the network with the same login/pass, if local admin allows it, with an improvement of the sense of community. That will be possible through a centralised user management.

Having access to all the network websites with the same authentication codes means to move the first steps into the creation of a unique personal identity within the network.