Our goal: a platform with community DNA

The goal of establishing a distributed network that circulated content via RSS led us to three core questions that served as a filter on our potential platform:

1. Has this platform been used to rapidly deploy a large number of interlinked sites from a basic template?

2. How widely does the platform integrate RSS into its structure – both in terms of creating outbound RSS feeds and in enabling easy, flexible aggregation of inbound RSS feeds?

3. Does this platform support blogs or wikis, which are the most common tools for online community and collaboration?

These three questions provided a litmus test for whether a platform had “community DNA”, and allowed us to quickly narrow a long list of possibilities. Some of the initial options that were set aside due to lack of community functionality included:

Ekton: no blogging
Kintera: minimal RSS orientation
MCMS: no blogging
Red Dot: blogging not core
Sharepoint: no blogging
SiteRefresh: RSS feeds are not core to software