The Office of the CIO and Information Services and Technology are working with the UC Berkeley community to develop a campus strategy on how to use technology to best support collaborative work on campus, now and in the future. This is timely work, as the campus IT community is increasingly faced with questions about and decisions around collaborative tools support in an environment where there are a vast and increasing number of choices available, and where many of those choices are made available by outside providers such as other universities, consortia, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook. See Collaborative Tools Strategy Development project for further background on this project.
In late March, we released a draft summary of the findings from the user research that forms the basis of this strategy. See the IST–Data Services Blog for these draft findings. We received many helpful comments from a large cross section of members of our campus community, as well as from people faced with similar challenges at higher education institutions around the world.
Since receiving those comments, we have performed additional user research to further refine the findings, consulted with various collaborative tools providers on campus about potential strategic goals, and developed a draft strategy. As of the writing of this article, over 200 individuals have contributed to the development of this strategy. It would not have been possible without their contributions, and the members of the project team would like to express their thanks to all who participated.
The draft strategy was released to the campus for comment in mid-August (see http://dsblog.berkeley.edu/2008/08/26/cctsd-2/), and the final version of the strategy will be available on the Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy Development website in early to mid-October.