A Web 2.0 social networking platform. The main theme of the portal is to create an extraordinary portrait of people living across the entire Earth. The concept behind the platform was created by France's most renowned traveler. The portal was presented to, among others, French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The site is also multilingual. The solutions used allow the platform to be translated into every language in the world, both by administrators and by regular users.

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The platform's goal is to bring together a large community from all over the world, allow the sharing of opinions and comments on various topics, and provide access to the portal in every language in the world.

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Initially, the platform was planned to be built entirely in Flash technology. Following further analysis, changes were introduced, and the portal was ultimately based on three different technologies: PHP/AJAX/Flash. The entire site engine was built using PHP. AJAX was additionally implemented to visually enhance the platform. Flash was mainly used for playing videos, recording video clips, and creating video captions/subtitles. All data was stored in a MySQL database.

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The system includes a large number of modules. It is divided into a user-facing part and an administration part. Users on the platform are divided into several groups with different access rights. These groups include: unregistered and registered users, moderators, confirmed and unconfirmed translators, and administrators.

Portal modules:

Front-end:

• a mosaic of portraits and podcasts of people from around the world,
• a mosaic of user portraits,
• search engine,
• user space.

Administration:

• user and permissions management,
• video management,
• subtitle and translation management,
• site content management,
• newsletter,
• statistics.

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The background of the entire platform is a mosaic of images of people from around the world who have been interviewed. The mosaic is dynamic — it can be panned, zoomed in, and zoomed out. Clicking on a given person zooms in on that person's face and gives the user the option to watch their video portrait.

The video player not only allows the film featuring a given person to be played. It also allows users to quickly find other videos of that person or similar videos of other people.

Additionally, when a video has a translation available, users can turn on subtitles describing the video.

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This module is similar to the main mosaic. The difference is that the recordings and interviews featured here are uploaded by users who have registered on the platform. All contributions are divided into a number of thematic groups.

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There are two types of search engines. Their way of working is similar. The difference lies in the division between interviews conducted by the traveler and opinions submitted by platform users.

The search filters include, among others, the options to:

• select a category and subcategory,
• search by keywords,
• select place of origin, gender, language, and translation availability,
• browse a cloud of most frequently used words.

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Every registered user had their own "space". The number of available features depended on the permissions a given user held.

1. Posting reviews/interviews
Every person can post reviews about themselves.
A review has categories and subcategories for better grouping of posted entries.
There are three ways to post interviews:

• uploading a video recording file,
• recording via a webcam,
• posting text.

2. Translations
The service allowed translation of everything found on the portal into any language in the world.
Depending on their permissions, users could add subtitles to videos, which were then moderated by people with higher permissions, or translate content on the site, which could in the future allow the service to be made available in other languages.
A system for creating different versions of translations was also implemented, similar to the one used for entering information on Wikipedia. Thanks to this, a user can see how their translations evolved and compare their translations with those of other users.

3. Messaging system
A module allowing communication between users via a short-message system.

4. Moderation
Only moderators and confirmed translators have access to this module.
Through this section, users can manage reviews and translations submitted by lower-ranked users.
Additionally, this module allowed for the management of reported abuse/violations.

5. My account
A system for managing one's own account settings.

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Administration allows for managing all users of the service. This involves adding, editing, and deleting users. Additionally, there are several user groups. Each group has assigned permissions related to access to individual modules of the site. The module allows for granting and revoking permissions for different groups.

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In addition to the same permissions moderators have for managing videos and translations submitted by regular users, this module also allowed for adding and managing interviews featured in the main mosaic. An advanced system enables the display, grouping, and filtering of resources containing reviews.

All information on the site is managed. Due to the possibility of translating the site into other languages, no content can be placed statically on the page. Among other things, the administrator has the ability to manage:

• static words and texts,
• page content,
• guestbook entries,
• translations.

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Every user can sign up for the service's subscription. Thanks to the newsletter module, the administrator can manage subscribed users, create subscriptions, and send them to various users. The administrator can create custom email templates, which are then used when sending out subscriptions.

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The system has its own statistics system. Since the service is highly extensive, an individual/custom solution had to be applied here. The statistics offer, among others, information on:

• posted reviews,
• translations,
• users,
• search engines,
• viewed reviews,
• progress in translating the site,
• etc.

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