Engage.

Services your community can use

ENGAGE is where your Community leverages its power to make something happen in the world.  It is not one platform like the other PeerConnect services; rather, it is a portfolio of offerings contributed by PeerConnect members that benefit a target group through collective Community action.  Any member can suggest a promising service to be included in the ENGAGE portfolio for others to test, implement, improve or adapt.

So far, the ENGAGE portfolio contains two services – Frontline, and The Knowledge Mela

  • Frontline is a one-stop helpline where Community members provide information locating emergency relief resources to persons impacted by disaster events. The application was developed in Open Source by the IT company Nutanix for SEEDS, a widely recognized Non-Governmental Organization that works with India’s most vulnerable communities to provide relief in humanitarian emergencies and build their resilience to future disasters. The service is suitable for national or local Disaster Management Communities with members from agencies able to engage local volunteers to compile an inventory of available resources. When activated, a helpline is set up and Community “Responders” use the inventory to quickly locate items needed by the callers.

    If your organization is engaged in humanitarian emergencies in disaster-prone areas and is networked with other organizations and local-level workers, Frontline would be a useful addition to your toolbox.

  • Interactive sessions for face-to-face settings

    Community-building is best done face-to-face, where “bandwidth” is strongest. In professional conferences and annual convocations, the networking that takes place outside of the presentations and events can be more valuable than the sessions themselves. PeerConnect offers the Knowledge “Mela” (a fair, in Hindi) – a selection of interactive sessions designed for professional forums to maximize the value of networking opportunities. The Knowledge Mela can be anywhere between a half-day session added to an existing event and a two-day self-standing “Annual Forum,” introducing one or several sessions specifically designed to gain deeper understanding of colleagues’ expertise, examine success cases showcased by their creators, and identify collaboration opportunities to take forward.

    The next time you are planning a Community get-together, PeerConnect can help make sure participants get the most value out of it.

Features

SHARE has been built with the social software application “Discourse”, which is sort of a WhatsApp group without the chaos. Like WhatsApp, everyone who is a member can post messages to the group on their mobile or desktop and reply to messages posted by others. Unlike WhatsApp, however,

  • The number of people who can join is unlimited, so everyone interested in joining is able to.

  • Messages sent to the group are approved by a moderator before they’re posted, who

  • makes sure they are offered in a positive and constructive manner.

  • Messages have subjects (“topics”), and can be replied to for creating a thread

  • Topics are organized under categories specific to your professional group, selected

  • when drafting a message

  • Topics and messages can also be hashtagged with keywords, to make them easier to

  • cluster for reading or searching

  • It works from both the web and email.

Members can also access and participate in any higher level Communities your group is associated with (country, regional, international.)