ESN Galaxy

Several team members of Youth Agora were closely involved in the development of the ESN Galaxy. This success story was in part the reason to set up Youth Agora.

ESN Galaxy: Why?

The ESN Galaxy was meant to bring a solution for the online situation of ESN. ESN has 280 sections in 32 countries. All sections need a website to inform their students. Most of these websites were not well built and didn't offer enough services for the Erasmus students. ESN should be a network, but in reality the community was very much scattered and isolated. There was little information and knowledge sharing between the sections. This meant that sections, all individually, spent resources to implement the same range of services for Erasmus students and that information collected at the local level, useful to the whole network, was not shared and was difficult to find. Since the needs of every ESN section are similar, i.e. services and management instruments for the whole community are required, re-implementing the same tools in every website is a loss of time.

How?

The ESN Galaxy Project is based on 3 pillars: ESN Satellite, ESN Galaxy and ESN Identity.

ESN Satellite: Website Template

A special web 2.0 website template was built following the ESN Corporate Identity guidelines, with a set of instruments and content management tools that is ready to use and that the sections can download and install in their web spaces in just a few minutes.

The template is also useful for the entire community inside the ESN Galaxy like Working Groups, Organisational Committees of AGMs or National Platforms, Fun(d)raisers Coordination, Alumni Community, etc…

Those sections that already have a website, have the opportunity to use only the ESN Satellite tools they need. All the tools, in fact, are implemented as separate components and could be used in stand alone mode just like a plug-in.

ESN Galaxy: Share your life!

Every ESN website mainly contains two kind of information:

A significant part of the information found on local ESN websites could be really useful also outside the local contest: just think about an ESN member looking for a house in a new city or people looking for information about ESN events of a city they are planning to go to.

To achieve this, information is collected at the local level and visualised in the ESN Galaxy page. In this way the local sections become a source of information for the whole network in sharing events, house and job offers, mentors and so forth.

All the collected information is kept, in a centralised way, in the esn.org databases with several strong benefits for all the network, such as:

• local websites become a source of knowledge and information for the whole network;
• it's possible to have a European-wide search through the ESN resources;
• information collected can be used for statistic proposes;
• having a huge amount of useful information could help in searching for sponsorship/partnership. 

ESN Identity: Be unique!

The third pillar of the ESN Galaxy Project is to empower the sense of community by making the network stronger. Now, in fact, the different ESN online communities are like islands in the ocean. Sharing useful information is one thing; it is also crucial to foster the contact among the members of the network.

To allow this, an ESN member could access all the websites of the network with the same login/pass, if local admin allows it, with an improvement of the sense of community. That will be possible through a centralised user management.

Having access to all the network websites with the same authentication codes means to move the first steps into the creation of a unique personal identity within the network.

Effects