As someone interested in alternatives to our current capitalist mess, I was really excited to be approached for this project. As you may know, even before the recent meltdown of the financial markets there were progressive entrepreneur-activists defining a new economy based in eco/social sustainability, fairness, and coopetition. Currently you’ll find a few media outlets tracking this emerging class of companies, funds, and trends. Xigi.net is one such pioneering site, spearheaded by Kevin Jones of Good Capital. Out of Xigi was born the Social Capital Index. Originally hosted on Xigi.net, the SCI is a resolution by Andrea McGrath and Jason Rissman, both contributors to the index, to create a space that would “explore, clarify, and discuss the emerging social capital marketplace.” Folks Pants collaborated with Sustainable Websites to quickly deliver SCI a great-looking prototype in time to showcase for the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco.
Folks Pants delivered:
- A database-driven content management solution that would allow taxonomized posting for a multiple categories, customizable look & feel, and scalability – since this was a prototype. We chose WordPress as a light-weight, (very) user-friendly, and cheap system that could be configured to the client spec, most importantly their smaller budget.
- Clean, professional-looking design. SCI wasn’t yet prepared for a full-blown branding concept, so we came up with a design that was relatively generic and could mature with the site’s success.
- Publishing as easy as pie. WordPress is currently the best free, open-source content publishing solution for less tech-savvy users. It’s admin interface is ahead of the curve when compared to Drupal and Joomla.
- Low-cost marketing. PHPList, another free, open-source solution for newsletter and list management was deployed. Along with WordPress’ native RSS output, we were able to give SCI basic marketing tools for cheap.
