I'm a grad student and two professors have approached me about being the project lead on developing a social-network platform. They're wanting to use it to create survey's via a collaborative community; and I'm curious if anyone knows any best practices for developing such a site, and the time/cost factors that goes into it. I've started looking into development via a LAMP platform, and think that we will use dedicated servers at first. Could anyone recommend starting points, perhaps based on own research or experience? Thanks!
