Following Chris’s post about English Heritage’s ‘Your Place or Mine’ the other week, we were pointed in the direction of a subsequent English Heritage social media project, the aptly-named ‘Our Place’.

‘Our Place’ describes itself as ‘…for people who work in broadening access to heritage. It is an online space where you can network with peers, share and be inspired by project case studies, and discuss the challenges facing you today. It also contains news, resources and links – everything you need to know about engaging communities with heritage.’.

I decided it was a bit cheeky to sign up just for a nose-around when I can’t really claim to work in ‘broadening access to heritage’ but the functionality and purpose seem pretty clear: this is an enclosed, common purpose social networking tool, much like those we’ve worked on for Janet and School Councils UK.

Now I know we’ve advocated against building from-scratch, proprietary networking systems in the past, suggesting instead a more open, facilitative approach, but for me there’s a key distinguisher across all three of the projects mentioned above: namely, that the community wanted to be set apart and have their own, enclosed space. Janet Collaborate grew out of a need for education professionals to have a single place to find content, School Councils UK has a network of paying members to connect and provide with services and English Heritage’s Miriam Levin tells us that ‘Our Place’ ‘came about as a direct result of the ‘Your Place or Mine?’ Conference as delegates told us that they wanted more chances to network’.

It looks to me like, in this, ‘Our Place’ has a core strength that many other social network initiatives miss: it is a pragmatic solution to a proven need. It’s not a vanity project or one done for the sake of it or an attempt to jump on a passing bandwagon; it helps solve people’s problems. You can see this pragmatism from the fact that the project was done online purely because it was ‘a lot more feasible and sustainable than running another huge conference’ (online is found to be the most appropriate medium, not just the most desirable). This commitment to an end rather than a means is paying dividends: Miriam says ’since we launched the site, it has been more successful than we could have imagined. It’s got hundreds of members, and there’s already plenty of project case studies uploaded where people are sharing good practise, a healthy discussion forum, big events listing and constantly updated News and Resources’.

Excellent! Here’s to more of these appropriate projects and the decline of token or trendy ones.