While it is relatively easy for students or graduates of particular disciplines, like for example computer engineering and informatics or business and economics, to search and find employment opportunities through various online platforms, applications and social networks, this is not the case for students or alumni of schools of arts and departments of art, music or theatre studies. Moreover, educational institutes seem to lack dedicated platforms specifically for art school students and alumni. Thus, general job boards or personal networking seem to be one-way approaches for young creative professionals towards career resources and services. At the same time, employers looking for particular creative professionals also have to turn to personal networking for seeking associates whose appropriateness and reliability can only be hypothesized based on opinions of a narrow and rather close social cycle. The existence of platforms specifically for art school students and alumni could be of significant usefulness not only for individual professionals and employers but, most importantly, for the establishment of mutual connections among educational institutions, labour market and society.

Having these observations in mind, with an intention to support mainly students and graduates of schools of arts but also artists and entrepreneurs to create a strong online community connecting education and labour market, we designed and developed Artepovera, an online social network aiming to bring together professionals and entrepreneurs and induce a new aura connecting higher education institutes and the creative labour market. Artepovera supports job postings as well as freelance and networking opportunities. Artists and potential employers can register and create their profiles providing information on individual portfolios and job postings, respectively. In addition to facilitating professional collaboration via the online submission of applications for posted positions, Artepovera also supports direct communication among creative professionals and entrepreneurs based on mutual consent and enables members of the community to express their opinion on other members via voting and preference expression (e.g., star rating and like), and short comments. Exploiting visualization techniques including an interactive map, Artepovera enables registered members to communicate and promote their interests and provides an opportunity for connection between schools of arts and the creative labour market to a mutual benefit. The originality of our application mainly stems from the blending of professional and social networking it features as well as from its subscription-free character. To the best of our knowledge, no other similar application is currently available in Greece, not even at a university-level as an employment, career and liaison service for students or graduates.

Artepovera is a responsive web application which supports accessibility features and is currently available in greek and english. It has been developed using mainly react and typescript as well as html and css for the user interface, node.js and the express framework for the server environment and a mysql database. Furthermore, we have adopted a distributed hosting scheme using four hosting platforms for maximum exploitation of the free version of each service as well as for the logical segmentation of the application components, i.e., frontend and backend, database and content.

Keywords: Social-networking application, schools of arts in higher education, creative labour market, university-creative industry cooperation, html, css, javascript.