Welcome to the Social Server project.  This has been developed as a social enterprise to generate revenue to support the free education project Ragged University and provide digital resources like websites for other socially oriented projects that add value to our communities.  It has been apparent for some time that many social and community oriented projects cannot afford the costs associated with having a professional website made for them. 

This marginalises communities in an age where the most powerful information resource available is only accessible by highly resourced organisations and companies.  The Social Server project has been developed to address this part of the digital divide.

Grassroots organisations struggle with either the finance or delivering the onerous paperwork associated with getting finance.  This social enterprise is a solution to some of the barriers that hold back development of communities.  Taking on commercial contracts will provide finance to provision such grassroots organisations with their own website and digital home; the revenue which comes will go towards paying for hosting, domain names, the construction of websites and the IT training which will give a level of autonomy to the communities which need it.

The Social Server project offers high quality, secure, custom made, optimised websites to commercial companies which need such IT solutions.  The quality of the websites is demonstrated by using the industry standard webdevelopment benchmarking tools to illustrate the quality of the builds.  These benchmarking tools – such as GT Metrix and Pingdom – can also be used to compare the quality of the website construction on offer with other successful websites already on the worldwide web.

This project takes a view of coherent design from the outset, where social, environmental and economic responsibility all take centre stage to how the enterprise operates.  These themes will be explored in a research capacity as time goes on so that practical and clear understandings underpin the Social Server.