BuddyPress.org

Hey everyone!

I’m part of the coordination of a global youth volunteer network, Activista, with youth groups working in 29 countries (primarily in the global south). We are quite an extensive group of people – more than 15.000 – who are connected in the global network.
Of course a major part of making this ‘global’ is to hook up with other volunteers online and currently we are using NING as a solution: http://www.myactivista.org
The core Activistas who are active on the site (around 1300) are pretty engaged, however we have one major problem: a heavy site and users on very bad internet connections.

It would be possible for us to lighten up the site a bit with some decent compression, but that would only take us so far. NING in itself is quite a heavy solution.

So my question here is – are there differences in what is possible on NING and Buddypress in terms of building a platform that will afford access from eg rural Tanzania with a reasonable load time?

I hope someone in here has some advice

Best,
Casper