Knowledge Exchange Platform for Young Professionals

Munity is an online platform where communities of students and young professionals exchange knowledge in their native language and discuss solutions for the problems they face during their learning and at their work. On the other side, Munity will enable employers reach passive candidates unreachable in traditional job boards.

Munity is a platform professionals visit every day to be better at what they do, and employers use to to reach the best talent in the region!

We are proposing an online knowledge exchange platform with specialized pan-Arab online community for every practical and professional domain, integrating an exhaustive set of collaborative knowledge exchange tools where user contributed content is verified and curated by other users.

These various knowledge exchange mechanisms will help professionals continuously expand their domain knowledge, find solutions for the problems they face at work or during their learning, and stay updated and relevant in their careers. User voting will enable collaborative filtering of the best content and will be connected to an online reputation system to reward the best contributors.

On the other side, Munity will be the place more professionals will choose to spend their time online, which will enable employers to reach a massive pool of passive candidates unreachable in traditional job boards which only attract active candidates seeking for a new job. According to various surveys, 70% of the global workforce is passive talent, which are more reachable on social media sites.

This is why recruiters are increasingly using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. However, posting through social media only enables the reach to a local subset of the entire pool which is insufficient or inefficient for most companies.

While Linkedin is very good at searching and headhunting for passive talents, it lags behind when it comes to postings reach and user engagement because of its low monthly active users rate (25%).

Munity will provide employers with the following:

• Greater reach for less budget suitable for both small and large companies (compare to Linkedin).
• Efficient and satisfying basic free reach for everyone (compare to Facebook and Twitter).. 

The problem we are addressing is the lack of pan-Arab online professional communities and content, which play an important role in the personal and career development of its members especially in their early professional life.

Global platforms do exist for this purpose. However there is a big barrier for most Arab users because of the language barrier and high competency levels.

Users have been using online forums and Facebook groups to form hundreds of small online communities. However these tools do not allow the accumulation of high quality content, nor do they help the formation of large scale communities.

Using collaborative filtering mechanisms Munity will allow the formation of high quality large-scale professional communities, enabling their members to reach out for experience outside their local communities.

Our manual analysis of Arabic Facebook groups confirmed the existence of online behaviour of knowledge exchange and  collaborative culture. We were able to identify over 100 groups in distinct professional specializations each with at least 10,000 members (1.7 million users) where users were using posts to exchange technical and personal experience, solve technical and non-technical problems, discuss latest trends or share useful links and online materials.

The outcome of Munity is the creation of sustainable online professional communities with high quality content addressing the knowledge and experience gap between formal high education programs and labor market needs and connecting them with employment opportunities.

Our beneficiaries are tertiary education students at their early years to junior and senior professionals with less than 10 years of experience. According UNESCO statistics, we have about 15 million of university students who enrolled since 2000 in various academic fields.

Deployment of the platform will happen through partnerships with online and offline students and professional communities, websites, and NGOs.

Tracking the geolocation of montly active users through platform analytics - Egyptian programmers community joining the platform (10,000 members)

Tracking mothly traffic size through platform analytics - High quality content base in programming community (1 million monthly visitors)

Tracking the ammount of monthly job openings submitted to the platform - Software companies submitting job openings (1,000 monthly openings)

Munity is a multi-community vertically structured platform with collaborative filtering mechanisms and user reputation which makes it possible to address the interests and incentives of the wide spectrum of mainstream professional users (unlike Quora which limited its scope it to world-class experts and cutting-edge knowledge).

Our platform is innovative in integrating a set of exhaustive knowledge exchange mechanisms (which are blogging, questions and answers, link sharing and discussions) with a social experience in a single place, which creates a more engaging space for professionals with diverse knowledge exchange activities. (Unlike StackExchange, a network of Q&A websites)

The principles of user experience design was part of our process from the early beginnings, which included understanding our customer existing behaviour throughout the analysis of all observed user activity and interaction on online platforms and community websites. This also included open conversations with members of these online communities and intensive interviews with members of a local community (around 25 members). Finally, one of the most powerful tool was empathy since we were also active members of existing online communities and we understood well the environment, incentives and problems of students and young professionals using these online tools.

Deployment of the platform will happen through partnerships with online and offline students and professional communities, websites, and NGOs.

Our targeted population is higher education students which has high access to internet connection and is already aware of the importance of online resources in expanding their knowledge and opportunities.

We estimate the period needed to reach the break-even point to be around 24-36 months in which we are planning for at least of two rounds of investments. The first round ($50K-75K) will be used for marketing costs and developers salaries. The second round ($120-150K) will be used for the additional costs of growth needed to reach over 250,000 community members and 10,000 job posts.

After this milestone, we think there are several options for scalablity including merging with international platforms such as Linkedin, Quora, or StackExchange.

Sustaining the growth, engagement  and quality content of online communities is the crucial factor of long-term success, which is the greatest risk factor that most community face including Munity.

https://www.facebook.com/munity.co

Access to external expertise and resources to solve the challenges of technology marketing on regional (Middle East and North Africa) and global level. Seeking mentorship in building scalable and robust user experience.

We have no official partnering organizations. We are currently advised by two business owners who have regional market experience.

Quora, Linkedin, StackExchange, Job boards and professional community platforms.