I have been searching for a friendly alternative to Moodle discussion forums for some time (Drupal does not fit the bill) and have only just started getting my hands dirty with Ning.
One problem with Ning is that it is ad supported. I think the coding is open source so a question is "Is this open source? "
We (in our city climate change network) can live with the ads but if if you want to use it without them you have to pay (about £20 per month). I believe that it is now possible for educational users to use it without the ads. Are any of you using Ning?
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Ning is a hosted service that is free to use.
To be open source the code needs to be available and there is no obvious way to access it on the site and a quick web search finds nothing either. Even it the code was freely available a much better question to ask is 'do they practice open development'? Open development means a diverse and active community of people working on the project, both users and developers. There will also be clear governance for managing contributions. This leads to sustainability.
You can find out more about open development and open source on the OSS Watch website.
I'll leave others to propose open source alternatives but I did recently come across Barnraiser Dutch.
Ning may be free in that it doesn't appear to have a cost, but it does not give you freedom. What would you do if you put loads of content in Ning and then the company behind it folded, closed the doors and turned off the servers? What would happen if they decided to start charging £10 per student per day? Even if you were taking your own backups of the data (not sure how you would do that) you would have no access to the code so you could not run your own service. With something like hosted Moodle you still have the freedom to move that from a hosted scenario to an internal server. Not only do you have the technical freedom to do so, you have the legal freedom. To address your need for a discussion area that gives you freedom I would suggest PHPBB, but also check out other variations of discussion such as identi.ca (like twitter but gives you freedom) or Elgg (like Facebook, but gives you freedom)
> PHPBB is very popular...
Or, if you want something with a good security track record, FUDforum does the same kind of job, and the lead programmer is one of the very best PHP coders, Ilia Alshanetsky.
http://fudforum.org/
Ning is definitely not open source. They used to expose some functionality via have an api, but they closed that down -- but even that wasn't much of a loss -- see http://hetypesshetalks.com/2008/12/04/saying-goodbye-before-saying-hello... for more info.
This article gives good background on Ning as a company: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/nings-infinite-ambition.html
I've written about Ning over on my blog: http://funnymonkey.com/taxonomy/term/17 -- the short version: I would recommend using Ning for a site where your data was expendable. If you want the security of knowing that your organization's work won't evaporate, use something else. (Can anyone say Sidekick?)
For a standalone forum replacement, I have had good experiences with Phorum: http://www.phorum.org/ -- with that said, I have not used it in a while.
--
FunnyMonkey -- Tools for Teachers
http://funnymonkey.com
You could try Simple Machines Forum. SMF http://www.simplemachines.org/about/
We use it with Drupal for the INGOTs because we wanted to restrict students from making comments on each others' work in the main site so Drupal forums would not work properly with that restriction.
An alternative might be StackExchange, the engine behind StackOverflow:
http://stackexchange.com/
This is a hosted solution, around £80 a month for a small site, which might be rather more than you were hoping to spend. StackExchange is not open source, but your content is freely available for you to download and use. It isn't a discussion forum as such, it's a question-and-answers engine - people ask questions and get answers to them. It might be worth searching Google for "Stack Overflow clone" as someone's bound to have decided they can make an open source version by now.
Many like the discussion forums offered within Mahara Groups.
Mahara is NOT an alternative to Ning... it is PLE (Personalised Learning Environment) not simply a social media application.... but the Groups functionality inside Mahara really is very well-designed and aesthetically pleasing.
Check it out at:
http://mahara.org and
http://demo.mahara.org
Derrin.
Derrin Kent
Trainer / Manager / Linguist / Geek
derrin [at] tdm [dot] info