Today’s the day that Ning switches over to paid models, so if you’re looking to replace Ning, you might want to check out Mahara. Mahara is a company out of New Zealand that offers an open source ePortfolio platform. An ePortfolio is like the paper-based portfolio, a compilation of work or information, but accessible and shareable online. And there’s more….

ePortfolios can include blogs, multimedia, documents, hyperlinks, images and more. What makes Mahara different is that they also offer a social networking component.

Mahara started as an ePortfolio program for educators and a school system in New Zealand, but it’s gone beyond students now. It’s a great system to use to create an online community.

Select Your Artefacts

The information – documents, blog post, marketing materials, videos, pictures, etc – that you want to share with your community are called Artefacts. Once you’ve uploaded your Artefacts, you arrange them in Views.

Create Your Views

Views are how you display and share your Artefacts. You can make multiple views, and share them with specific users, or Groups. You can pull together whatever combination of Artefacts you‘d like to create a View – you can use documents more than once, include RSS feeds, blogs, and more. Think of a View as a profile page or webpage.

Network Your Groups

Then there’s Groups. Groups are the online communities you can create. You can invite other users to join, and share Views. This is the social networking aspect. You can also message people, create a Watchlist, which is like a Facebook status update, and will send automated notifications of changes or updates to the View. You’ll maintain a list of Friends, or other users, with whom you can share Views and join Groups.

You can watch a demo of Mahara and learn more about the platform by visiting their site. Mahara is a different sort of networking platform, but the ability to share select information makes it worth checking out. You’d be able to customize each View to a specific set of customers, test out different design or marketing approaches and see the reaction, or use it to create ‘exclusive’ memberships.

And since it’s all Open Source, it’s free to test out and play around with. What have you got to lose?