It's just over a week now until the first meeting of our e-mentors and I'm getting really excited. After the phenomenal response we had for the e-mentoring opportunity through the huge task of whittling down 135 UK applications it's going to be amazing to finally meeting the 20 chosen mentors in Berlin, who will be coming together from right across the UK, Poland, Slovenia, Germany and Estonia.

You can read more about the background of the Participation for Change project elsewhere on the website.

As well as preparing the mentors for the meeting and project ahead I've been busy developing this website. In case you're wondering why we chose to use Ning to create a presence online, this is the reasoning:

For the Participation for Change project we needed a solution(s) that could do the following:

• Be based online and allow people to register
• Allows the project team a place to connect, share information and continually develop the project
• Allows the project team to interact with the mentors in a private place
• Run an e-Conference with pre recorded speaker sessions, live comment, space for networking and a live wrap up session
• Facilitate one-to-one e-Mentoring, lead by the 20 e-mentors
• Allow us to showcase European/ capacity building stories throughout the life of the project

The problem with using a number of different solutions for these tasks is that users would need to create multiple profiles, which I think would put people off from taking part.

Why are we using Ning?

• It is online so accessible by all
• It requires people to log in so we can capture information about users and also stop spammers
• Users will only have to log in once to carry out all of the activities
• All the activities will happen in the same place
• It will allow users to create their own profile on the site so enabling connections and networking
• We can embed videos for people to watch as the "online conference" and have the speakers online to comment live
• We can also run a live round up session at the end of the e-Conference
• We can create groups for mentors to connect with each other and their mentees
• There is also private chat where mentors/ mentees to use
• It allows us to try out different tools to test what works best
• It is easy to adapt and add in new features

It would be great to hear what you think? Would you have used a site like Ning? What would you have done differently?