Most are simple to understand and really rely on their members providing a service.

Once you go beyond that you can use system to provide lists and have news etc, still the issue is communciations.

In our community we use excel to manage the membership lists, we will move to another system soon because we want to share and have this list accessible to all of the active rather than passive members.

We are looking at two products the favorite at the moment is Activity Forum if it works for us. We will see, however it does have a CMS in built as a news and events diary and its simple (or so it seems).

Have a look at it

Regards
John

I do like the idea of working out the bias you describe by looking at a schema, but it’s often not that simple. Certainly, with systems like DNA, Scoop and Slash you’d be very hard-pushed to find a definitive bias one way or the other. In fact, those cases show that the very idea of differentiation is outmoded. DNA was designed from the start to be both: a community focused around content-creation. Both the content and community sides have done some serious evolution since then.

I think you also just said it nicely in the fact that CMSs dont start off with the concept of the user, and users are related to content. Whereas social-software starts off intrinsically with that. Then the users are related to each other via content, in the case of content focused apps like messageboards, or more directly to each other via social networking apps like friendster.

By the time either type of system is fully formed there are no doubt lots of similarities in the data. Perhaps it’s more like parallel evolution rather than divergent.

I would be interested in seeing the DB schemas for slash or scoop and see what they look like.