Collaboration with colleagues and partners is increasingly the way that we work at UC Berkeley. We collaborate with non-profit and industry partners on developing renewable biofuels and synthesizing medicines to fight malaria and other diseases. We work with colleagues at other universities to affordably improve California's K-12 schools and to decipher ancient Mesopotamian tablets, to better understand the lessons of human history and culture. And we engage with other staff and administrators to continually improve our campus's business processes.
To work effectively with others, we face many difficulties, ranging from working across organizational lines to being frequently separated from our collaborators by time and distance. Today, a large and ever-growing collection of online collaborative tools — for writing and editing documents, planning and tracking tasks, virtually "meeting" together in shared spaces, opening up access to laboratory notebooks and research data, and a great many other purposes — offer tremendous promise. Many members of the campus community have begun using collaborative tools, often on an ad hoc basis, weaving them into their formal collaborations and their day-to-day work.
However, the sheer number of these tools; the rate of change in this area; issues of data governance and risk around governance; protection of the campus's valuable and often sensitive data; limited capability to identify and authenticate our partners; and more — all challenge our capacity to use and support these tools effectively.
Embracing the chaos
To address this landscape, one that is ripe with both opportunity and challenge, the campus has formally adopted a strategy for supporting collaborative activities through information technology. You can find the strategy and its background materials on the UC Berkeley Collaborative Tools Strategy website.
The strategy is based on the tenet of "embracing the chaos". That is, improving campus readiness to "plug-in" new and innovative collaborative tools into its activities around research, teaching and learning, public service, and campus business. This is to be accomplished through seven strategic goals; among these, to provide:
- Enhanced identity management, permitting us to more easily work online with collaborative partners from other institutions.
- Improved access to campus data for use in collaborative activities.
- Clarity on when and how our data can be stored and used outside campus borders.
- Guidance on selecting and using collaborative tools, in part by building and sustaining social interaction around these tools.
This strategy was requested by campus Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Shelton Waggener, and was developed by IST's Data Services department under the leadership of its director, David Greenbaum, in an effort that was greatly informed by the participation of more than 200 people and groups across the campus, and at other institutions.