Civilution LLC

I just find it amusing that you came from somewhere.
           -Marcella, Grosse Pointe Blank

Where Collaborative Websites Come From

The Hard Old Days: Programming from Scratch
Only the oldest and most heavily used websites, like Amazon and Yahoo, are programmed entirely from scratch. This is an amazingly complicated and expensive undertaking, so it's a good thing that no one does it anymore.

The Rise of Toolkits, namely the Arsdigita Community System
The Rise of Toolkits, namely the Open Arsdigita Community System In the past few years, some very powerful toolkits have come along that implement the basic nuts-and-bolts machinery of most collaborative websites. While most of these toolkits are proprietary and very expensive (like ColdFusion, BroadVision and Vignette), the toolkit that we use, the Open Arsdigita Community System or OpenACS, is in fact Open Source, free to copy, and is being used, upgraded and maintained every day by a community of many thousands of web professionals.

The Upshot: This Gets Easier Every Day
With these toolkits - and especially our OpenACS toolkit - the programming effort (and therefore cost) in building one of these sites has been drastically reduced over the past couple years. Collaborative websites are now affordable to and being used by big companies, smaller not-for-profit agencies, and even "small-fry" outfits like hobby clubs.

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