Web App

The term e-community, online community, or virtual community brings together several meanings depending on the context. It can be understood as an interest group where several people or organizations share common topics, information, and concerns; as a fan club where people join an organization’s or brand’s approach by following its news, approving it, or even disseminating it in turn; or as a working group.

In the latter case, community members will circulate information, but also documents on which they will work together, and will be able to move projects forward without the need to meet physically.

Keep control

If the success of an e-community is based on both its size and its dynamism, these two assets can be turned against the association in the event of a crisis. A lousy buzz will be amplified more quickly if the community is large and active. The loss of control of an e-community can have severe consequences on the association’s e-reputation.

It is therefore essential to know how to manage the time and tone of the response, the ability to act outside the web to defend the association’s image. A content strategy determined at a very early stage will also make it possible not to focus all eyes on the association itself, but to propose an opening on broader areas of interest.

Define a content strategy

Mobilization consists of encouraging Internet users to sign a petition, join a movement (join the association, participate in a demonstration, give of their time), make a donation. In other words, to move from the web to real life. It is essential to create a proper content strategy to achieve this objective.

Monitoring tools exist to do this: the simplest is probably Google Alerts. It allows you to receive articles in your mailbox related to the keywords you have chosen. Another tool like Feedly will enable you to aggregate RSS feeds from different sites. As for Pearltrees, it proposes to organize the contents playfully and visually.

Get commitment

Associations must make them receptive to their actions to make the most of e-communities. It is called engagement. It can be achieved at several levels: the first level of commitment is approval. On social networks, it manifests itself as a like or shared publication. A commitment of this nature is already, in itself, a challenge.

It will be necessary to test different types of publications: information, humor, testimonies, reports of actions, links to more general news, etc. and see which ones work best. Varying the temporality of publications (time of day, week or weekend, frequency) also makes it possible to feel when the e-community is most attentive.

Choose your places of expression

Most media offer Internet users the opportunity to react to the content they are provided by writing comments, but a large part of the exchanges take place mainly on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram are virtual places where you can enjoy, share information, comment on it, and even complete or contest another user’s comment.

As for working groups, tools have been developed both for the major Internet players (Google) and for free software (Framasoft and its Framalibre suite of free software), which make it possible to create online documents, modify them in multiple and in real time, launch surveys, communicate by videoconference, etc.

The text of the controversial copyright directive was debated and voted on in the European Parliament on Tuesday 26 March. The vote is in favor of it.

The debate on the “Copyright Directive” opened on Tuesday 26 March in a European Parliament that we could not describe as full. It finally ended with a vote in favor of the Directive.

A text considered unbalanced

The European Copyright Directive is a controversial text. Some articles, in particular, Articles 11 and 13, concentrate the majority of criticism. They focus respectively on hyperlinks and moderation of platforms such as YouTube. Many fear that these provisions may be very difficult or even impossible to enforce, without limiting freedom of expression or creativity.

The debate began in the morning. Several Members, out of a total of 751 in Parliament, took the floor. Many have spoken out against the directive. Tiemo Wölken (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) was evident. According to him, “Article 13 should be deleted”.

Article 11 has also been repeatedly cited as problematic and difficult to implement. According to the Italian Massimiliano Salini (European People’s Party), this Tuesday 26th was playing out “one of the most important battles” of his mandate: that for creativity.

Votes in favour of the directive

Other Members, on the other hand, defended the text draft so far. José Blanco Lòpez, a Spanish deputy (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), for example, explained that for him, there is “no creation without fair remuneration.” The text and in particular Article 13 will allow a “redistribution of the wealth of the major platforms,” he said, before adding that no one would limit freedom of expression, on the contrary.

Andrus Ansip, the Vice-President of the European Commission, who has never concealed his support for the text, shared this view. “The vote is a message to creators: we tell them that we care about them and that we want to protect them for[their] valuable work,” he told the microphone. According to him, the “ultimate beneficiaries” of the reform will be the citizens. It, therefore, believes that the Directive can improve access to art and culture.

Intense debate and discussions

The vote was held around 1 PM with a full Parliament this time. Some MPs had installed anti-article 13 signs in front of them; others support signs.

348 votes adopted the directive to 274. The European Parliament validated Articles 11 and 13. Axel Voss, smiling, was applauded by Parliament while others, such as MP Julia Reda, spoke of a “dark day” on Twitter. The amendments that had been proposed to modify the text were not even voted on in the end.

The final vote concludes the trialogue, i.e., the discussions between the various European bodies on the text. States will now have to discuss the implementation of the laws.

The Chinese company Tencent joins the Platinum members of the Linux Foundation and puts its frameworks, Tars, and TSeer in open source.

The first concerns the management of micro-services, the second concerns the discovery of services and registration. Last March, Tencent had already created an IA project within the foundation with nine other providers, including Baidu, Huawei, and ZTE.

Tencent, one of China’s leading web service providers, becomes a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation along with his compatriot Huawei. It means he supports the foundation that oversees some of the world’s leading open source projects with an annual amount of more than $500,000. By becoming a Platinum member, the group based in Shenzhen is also bringing one of its leaders to the Linux Foundation board of directors. It is Liu Xin, CEO of Tencent’s mobile Internet entity.

Two other Chinese providers, Alibaba and Baidu, are also Gold members of the foundation and pay $100,000 a year to contribute to the organization.

Meanwhile, Tencent announces that it is putting two of its projects in open source under the leadership of the Linux Foundation.

The first, Tars, is a high-performance RPC framework designed for the development, implementation, and maintenance of micro-services. It is based on the naming of services using the tars protocol and provides a platform to operate semi-automatically. The project allows users to perform procedures remotely and supports C++, Java, Node.js, PHP and Python languages. A construction system and a code generation tool for agile development accompany it.

The second project, TSeer, is a light version of Tars. This fault-tolerant framework allows discovery and registration of services. The framework is used in Tencent products such as QQ Browser, App Store or Mobile Manager and handles an average of 10 billion requests every day. In a statement, vice president of Tencent, Zeng Yu, said the Chinese group has more than ten years of experience managing interactions with large numbers of users, “enabling Tars and TSeer to optimize load balancing and fault tolerance systems entirely.

Founding member of LF Deep Learning Foundation

Tencent’s growing involvement in free software comes a few months after the creation, last March, already within the Linux Foundation, of the LF Deep Learning Foundation.

The project’s goal is to support innovation in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning by making these technologies available to developers. Tencent is one of its founding members along with three other Chinese providers, Baidu, Huawei and ZTE, and nine other members, including French Orange.

The Shenzhen Group contributes to the LF Deep Learning Foundation through its Angel Artificial Intelligence Project, a high-performance distributed machine learning platform it has developed with Beijing University. The description of this platform, designed for large data models, mentions that it can support more than a billion parameters. At the end of 2017, Tencent was the first Chinese technology company valued at more than $500 million on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, ahead of Alibaba. The latter, also heavily involved in artificial intelligence, announced in February IA services in its cloud in Europe.