In order to overcome the current corona crisis, social distancing is a must. Difficult enough in private life, companies and organizations face a challenge that threatens their very existence. With the right community solution, physical distance can be maintained while enabling productive exchange.
Efficient cooperation in companies, institutions, and organizations depends on communication. The quicker and easier it is for participants to exchange information, the faster and more effectively strategic goals can be achieved. Corona has, so to speak, thrown this basic principle off track: Employees were sent home to work remotely, meetings cannot be held on site as usual, and previously simple discussions suddenly require technical solutions to close the emerging gaps.
The crowd-creation GmbH in Hesse has been offering consulting and support services in conceptual design and creation of flexible community solutions to customers since more than ten years. The technological basis for such a community platform is the free content management system Drupal, in connection with Open Social as an also free interface. The open source nature of these systems allows them to be used as foundations to adapt a variety of functionalities to the individual requirements of a community platform.
With suitable software, the dialogue between physically separated conversation partners can be maintained over the web. Messenger services, online meetings, and video conferences are now used in many areas as the basic means of organizing daily business. Providers offering these software and online services are currently experiencing a sharp increase in demand. As stand-alone applications, however, these tools prove to be less flexible and less suitable to organize complex workflows in a comprehensive manner or to manage larger groups of stakeholders.
Combining different communication channels and distinct applications in a central community platform in order to organize the general workflow facilitates the coordination of different tasks and processes and thus makes it easier to exchange information in the long term, even in larger groups.
”Instead of interconnecting employees, partner, or customers via a multitude of different channels, all of which have to be used, maintained, and supported independently, a community platform forms a versatile communication center,” explains Ulrich Neiss, CEO of crowd-creation GmbH. “Be it market research community or co-working platform, with Open Social we provide our customers with smooth and easy communication, information exchange, and interaction, even across global distances.”
