Communication and collaboration are the tracks upon which any interdisciplinary research and education institution operates. In recent years, a new generation of tools and service delivery options — including blogs, wikis, mashups, Web 2.0 tools, service-oriented architectures, etc. — has started to be developed. At the same time, as the work across all disciplines and contexts at the University becomes increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary, there is an increased need and demand for advanced tools to support these collaborations. These new tools show great potential to help support exactly this sort of core communication and collaboration activity, whether it's students working together on projects; faculty and researchers tackling critical global issues, in conjunction with colleagues across the campus, nation, and world; or partnerships that engage members of the Berkeley campus with community organizations and governments.
One way to look at a higher-education institution is as a community of communities, with varying degrees of integration into the whole. These newer collaborative tools offer the possibility of bringing these communities closer together by fostering new connections, strengthening existing connections, and making all involved more productive and efficient.
National discussions are underway at various federal agencies, including NSF and NIH; at private foundations, including MacArthur and Mellon; among communities developing community-source software; and in higher-education IT departments around the world about the impact of these tools on scholarly effort and the explosion in volume and options at individual and institutional disposal.
At a local level, Berkeley campus departments are engaged in numerous efforts to use this new generation of tools to more efficiently support current services and to provide enhanced capabilities in the future. As our options in this space continue to expand, AVC-IT and CIO Shel Waggener has asked the Collaboration Services group within IST's Data Services department to build an overview of the current state of collaborative tools on campus and the planned future directions of these tools, and to assess those directions in the context of the national discussion.
This strategy will examine the University's needs at the intersection of content, collaboration, and community and will inform the campus's long-term strategic decision-making about support for these collaborative tools. It will help us to better understand the current landscape of IT services on campus and discern what trends are emerging regarding the user of these tools on campus. In its recommendations, the strategy will identify the issues we must consider as we move forward, and suggest guidelines for evaluating and defining strategic directions.
The project team is gathering input from faculty, researchers, students, staff, and community members forming a broad cross-section of the campus community; IT staff; and vendors and community source providers of collaborative tools. This input will encompass the full range of teaching, research, public engagement, and administrative work that takes place every day on campus.
The final strategy will be used not as a tactical reaction to the current technology offerings on campus, but rather as input to this year's update of the campus's broader technology strategic plan. As such, the strategy will be used to guide decisions about the implementation of new, and evolution of existing, collaborative tools, on both campuswide and departmental levels.
The first draft of this strategy will be made available to every campus community member for comment, starting in late March.
For more information about this project, and to comment on the draft strategy when it is available, see the Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy Development website, or contact Ian Crew, Also, for more details about the user research being carried out as part of this project, see the iNews article User-centered design in IT: Case studies.