Quick links:
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 panning 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.
