B2B social network question and answer application

Project brief We need an experienced developer to design and build the prototype of a LinkedIn Questions and Answers style professional social network application for an existing B2B community of IT professionals in the public sector. The two reference sites are LinkedIn Questions and Answers and Quora. The client is an award-winning online B2B news and information publisher aiming to radically change the way we deliver community. The objective is to deliver an application that creates a professional social network in which members will want to share knowledge and experience to better solve common business problems. We have an existing 26,000 strong registration base and comment and persona tools, but have limited community interactions – users make comments against news items. We see this application as a key tool to drive existing community engagement and future community growth, registrations and traffic. Our portal is built in ColdFusion and MySQL platform but for the new Q&A application we will use whatever technology will best meet the above business aims. The Q&A application must enable members of the network to post and reply to questions, plus to share their questions and answers with people not yet members of the community. The Q&A application should be intuitive to use with a very strong focus on usability. The Q&A application should enable users to either post and tag their own questions, or answer questions posted by other members of the network. Users should be able to ask questions to whole network or to individual members. Users should be able to attach documents to their posts, and embed links. Users should be able to invite others to join. The application should provide hyper sharing and hyper log-in with Twitter and Facebook. Users must be able to rate questions and answers, which will help determine how high in a listing of questions they appear Ranking activity should be displayed for posters of questions and answers The application should have full simple sign-up and registration tools, password reset and recovery, and integrate with existing user accounts. The application will need to be integrated with current persona and user activity data, using existing registration and sign-in, persona, comment tools and user activity wall. The application should have simple back end management and reporting tools. The back end tools should enable admin to see and manage user activity, suspend members, suspend questions. Admin should also be able to feature questions. We will are not looking for the cheapest bid, but one most likely to meet our objectives. We will only consider suppliers with a proven track record in delivering successful social network developments, with current reference sites.