The New Club Platform Is Now Online!

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The new Club platform is now online! It features some new services, listed below, and more importantly, it will serve as a foundation for additionnal services we will create on demand, depending on your wishes.

You can have a look at the site map here.

New Services

Here are some of the new services available:

• Multilingual knowledge base
• Blog space allowing Bronze, Silver, Gold members to have their blog online on the Mandriva Club -> ask for a blog now!
• Club Contributors space for people who'd like to take part in the design of future Club services. Current hot topics are: a new collaboratively maintained hardware compatibility list system, designing a catalogue for describing available applications in a friendly way, Club rich desktop app and more.
• Improved mirror list module
• Planet Mandriva page for keeping an eye on what the Cookers are saying
• Latin American space: this space will contain news and information specifically related to the Mandriva Latin American community

Note: Club V1 platform will remain accessible on http://clubv1.mandriva.com until end of August.

Users are builders!

The platform is entirely wiki based, which means you can take active part in the Club evolution. The platform builds upon XWiki - an amazing 2G wikiwiki engine, Tomcat, MySQL, and… Mandriva Linux.

The design of the new Club was humbly inspired by remarks contained in these excellent articles:

• Sharing and Creating Knowledge in Open-Source Communities - Andrea Hemetsberger, Christian Reinhardt
• Customers as Innovators: A New Way To Create Value - Eric Von Hippel

Mandriva Community development lies in your hands. You as users - advanced, intermediate or beginner users - play a key role in the Mandriva innovation process, so feel free to express your needs, your ideas, your wishes and grievances!

What's next?

Now that the foundation is in place, we will focus on creating advanced services for helping you take the most of your Mandriva Linux system. Here's a preview of what's coming next:

• Advanced poll system for getting to know you better, and let you express your wishes democratically (will be online end of August, with a poll about the new services you'd like and the current quality of service)
• Improved blog space with custom skins
• A catalogue of user-friendly descriptions of OSS Linux applications, that can get installed easily from the browser
• A community help desk to get help more efficiently from the community
• A Club rich client application for improving the user experience in using the Club: the application will consist of a rich editor for editing and browsing the knowledge base, a real-time support module, an integrated application for taking the most of the Club and of the distro
• A service similar to http://del.icio.us for bookmarking the web collectively, specifically on Linux, Mandriva and OSS topics

So, to sum it up, the main idea of this new platform is to let the collective intelligence of Club members community express its whole potential of creativity!

We thank all of you for your active support during the last years, and we hope you will enjoy the new Club and will be an active part of it!

Mandriva Club Team