You can find the Send a Message to ... link on the right-hand sidebar of every individual or community. Be aware that Messages sent to communities go to every member, so please think before you spam! 

You can view and also send messages by clicking on the messages link in your personal navigation bar - the one that runs across the page under the Emerge logo. Select a user or community from the drop down menu on the compose page. You'll notice that only people you've added as friends and communities you've already joined are included on this list - basically your on site address book - so you may want to start adding some more friends :)

Official documentation can be found over at the Elgg wiki, although you can always message me or open a helpdesk ticket if you run in to problems. 

Once you've subscribed to your external feed in this way, all posts published after subscription will appear on site. Once posts have been published, it's a good idea to add tags. This can be done by opening the post while you are signed in and selecting 'edit'. Then just add your post keywords, separated by commas, to make it easy for people interested in particular topics (for example, knowledge management, data protection, accessibility, etc). 

OK.

1. First, make sure you are signed in and are the owner of the community you want to publish your external project feed to!

2. Next, click on Networks from your banner navigation bar, Select Owned Communities, and then Administer from the list under the name of your community. Alternatively (and much quicker) just select your community from your right hand navigation panel. It should be at the bottom, under the heading 'Owned Communities'.

2. Under your personal banner navigation bar, you'll now have your community navigation bar list. You need to select Feeds. Make sure you select the groups Feeds page and not your personal profile Feeds page. The next steps are the same for publishing external content to either - so if you do want to run an external feed through your own blog, follow the same steps but use your personal navigation bar Feeds page. 

3. You'll now have a page open which contains a box. paste in the address of the external feed you want to use (this is not the same as the website address). TIP: sometimes feed addresses appear like this: feed://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/news/rss/ if yours does, you need to manually replace feed:// with http://

4.  Clicking the subscribe tab after you've pasted the feed address into the box should hopefully give you a pink message box containing the wonderful words "Your feed subscription was successful" Hooray! Now to add your subscription to your community blog. Select 'Publish to blog' from the banner navigation bar running under your success message. 

5. Simply tick the box of next to the feed you want to run through your blog and select update. You can unsubscribe at anytime by un-ticking the box and updating. You can also run multiple feeds through your site the same way. 

Happy syndicating!  

One of the issues I was keen to see on the table is the Emerge communities relationship to our central platform & own social networking service - to this site. Where are we going? What is our collective vision for this space? And what are our ground rules?

One of the reasons we used a social networking site as our primary home, as opposed to a more traditional and less democratic web site, was the understanding that the Emerge community, whatever shape it took, would not be homogeneous. It would be made up of many groups, networks and communities. Individual projects, and individual members, would themselves belong to many, sometimes overlapping, circles (and some weird, asymmetrical shapes) of connections.

The use of this site, where any member could set up their own groups, import and export relevant information, and make connections with other people who shared interests, was a deliberate attempt to support the kinds of shifting, adhoc and more permanent communities and networks we all belong to. My personal vision and hope for the site was that it would become home to cutting edge projects of national and international importance and interest, and that we would see groups and communities form and flourish around the topics and technologies we are investigating.

From the outset, our 'border policy' - who is able to take up residence here, make themselves at home, or just drop in, has been a semi-permeable and pragmatic one. The time seems right however to revisit this approach and to ask ourselves questions about where we are wanting to go with the platform, who we want to be able to make use of it, and how it can best serve our multiple interests as individuals, as project members, and as people who operate within a mesh of different allegiances, responsibilities and preferences. 

So I'm pleased to announce that as part of our ongoing User & Development activities, we will be holding a community meeting during our upcoming online conference. The session will be between 1-2pm on Wednesday 23rd April, following George Siemens Keynote at 11-12pm Please do come along and help us collectively plot the course for the Emerge platform membership and nail our vision for the future of our social networking service.