IST-Data Services Blog

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.

You have an opportunity to shape this strategy and hence the future of collaborative technology used on campus.

As we did with our findings, today we are releasing a draft of the collaborative tools strategy for review and comment.

We are distributing this strategy widely in draft form to elicit comments, feedback, and guidance from the campus and higher education communities.  We believe only through that method can we develop a strategy that will support the creation of an environment where collaboration is easy and natural. We would greatly appreciate any guidance, perspectives, corrections, or suggestions.  The development of the strategy to this point has been heavily dependent on the insight, comments and feedback we have from well over 200 people throughout the process.  Our thanks to everyone who has taken the time to participate.

It is only through further input that we will be able to refine this into a strategy that is truly useful across campus.

Review the Strategy

Strategy, Draft 2 (PDF, 11 pages)

Several of the goals in this strategy are discussed in more detail in individual “Spotlight” documents. If you have particular interest or expertise in those areas, we would also appreciate feedback on those documents.

Providing Feedback

After reviewing the draft strategy, you may comment directly below, in the comments section of this blog post.  We may include quotes from any comment posted below in the report. If you’d like to be acknowledged for any quotes from your comments, please include your name, title, and organization in your comments. If you wish to submit a comment that will not be shared beyond the project team, send it to Ian Crew at icrew@berkeley.edu.

[Edit: A draft of the findings based on this strategy is now available.  Comments continue to be greatly appreciated.]

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.

You have an opportunity to shape this strategy and hence the future of collaborative technology used on campus. Today, we are pleased to release for your review the first draft of three sections of the upcoming Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy document.

We are intentionally releasing these first three sections of this strategy document at an early stage to elicit comments, feedback, and guidance from the campus community. We believe only through that method can we accurately represent the many collaborative practices and perspectives on the Berkeley campus. We would greatly appreciate any guidance, perspectives, corrections, or suggestions. We’re particularly looking for more guidance around the needs for collaborative technologies in research and teaching.

As of today, the final recommendations to be included in this strategy have not yet been written. We have made the decision to release these initial findings before the recommendations, in order to ensure that the recommendations reflect your feedback, and that of many others on campus, on this early stage draft of the document.

For more information

For more detailed information about this project, please see section II of the strategy document, “Introduction & Goals of the Strategy.”

If you have any questions, please contact Ian Crew, icrew@berkeley.edu.

Read the strategy

Section II-Introduction & Goals of the Strategy

Section III-Definition of Collaborative Tools for the purposes of this strategy

Section IV-Findings

Reviewer’s guide

We would greatly appreciate any response you might wish to offer. As you comment, you may wish to include:

• Your reactions to the data we’ve gathered
• Issues or data we’ve missed or omitted
• Your suggestions of additional issues the campus should consider
• An overview of the discussions or decisions taking place in your organization in these areas
• Your recommendations for strategic directions and next steps for the campus

We do realize that there is a great deal of information here. An outline of the first three sections of the complete strategy document, released today for your review and comment, appears below. If your time is limited and you can only focus on a single section of these findings, please focus on section IV.C, starting on page 50 of that section.

2. Introduction & Goals of the Strategy (PDF, 5 pages)
   1. Key Questions
   2. Background for this work
   3. Methodologies
3. Definition of Collaborative Tools for the purposes of this strategy (PDF, 4 pages)
   1. What is “collaboration”?
   2. Why is collaboration important?
   3. What are “collaborative tools”?
   4. What types of collaborative tools are available?
4. Findings (PDF, 74 pages. If you can only focus on a single section of these findings, please focus on section IV.C, starting on page 50.)
   1. What are the primary contexts of collaboration on the campus, and how do people use tools to facilitate them?
   2. What collaborative tools are campus IT providers currently providing or using?
   3. What are key campus needs?
   4. What are the services and service models being offered by external providers?
   5. What are the costs of campus services and alternative services?
   6. What are other peer institutions doing? Why?
   7. What are other policy, legal, etc. issues we need to be aware of?

After reviewing these sections, you may comment directly below, in the comments section of this blog post.  We may include quotes from any comment posted below in the report. If you’d like to be acknowledged for any quotes from your comments, please include your name, title, and organization in your comments. If you wish to submit a comment that will not be shared beyond the project team, send it to Ian Crew at icrew@berkeley.edu.

The deadline for comments on this draft of the strategy document is Friday, April 11, 2008. The complete strategy document, including recommendations, will be released for another round of comments in late April.

There’s a really nice post about the Bamboo project at http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2008/01/31/bamboo-one-to-watch/ 

No, we didn’t pay for this post (really!), but we’re very pleased that this work is receiving such a good response. 

For more information about the Bamboo project, see the Bamboo Project Proposal (PDF).

Earlier this year, a diverse committee of campus leaders met with representatives from Google and Microsoft to explore the Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@EDU service offerings and to determine if these vendors’ offerings in the areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally (via the current CalMail, WebFiles, and CalAgenda services).

In addition to examining the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing campus messaging services, such as email and calendaring, to one of these vendors, the committee also explored their associated collaborative tools offerings, such as collaborative writing; social bookmarking; photo, audio, and video sharing; and mapping, which may also be of considerable campus interest.

The report from this committee (192KB PDF) is now available.

On January 4, Shel Waggener and David Greenbaum coordinated a well-recieved workshop at the Common Solutions Group entitled “Collaborative Tools in Higher Ed: The growth, intersection and overlaps of options”.

The Common Solutions Group (CSG) is a set of institutions of higher education and higher education IT consortia working together to create a common infrastructure and toolset required for the future of our institutions.

The presentations from this workshop are now available at http://www.stonesoup.org/Meetings/0701/tools.pres/.

The IST Collaborative Tools project team, which was facilitated by DataServices Collaboration, Presentation, and Analysis group, recently completed an investigation into the different sorts of collaborative tools in use within IST. Their report is now available.

Please send any comments or questions about the report to:collab-tools@lists.berkeley.edu, or post them as comments to this article.

The project team that produced this report included Chris Ashley, Randy Ballew, Ian Crew, Kevin Haney, Rick Jaffe, Jeff Kreutzen, Jeff McCullough, Aron Roberts, and Dianne Walker. This project team accomplished the following tasks:

• researching the current ways that people are working onlinecollaboratively
• examining where online tools such as bSpace, BearShare, andBaseCamp might improve these interactions
• defining the technical and user requirements of a collaborativetool for use in IST
• defining the larger realm of collaborative tools (e.g. tickettracking, bug tracking, version control, etc.) that IST needs to doits work.
• starting an examination of how the tools on the market might matchup to the requirements generated during this process

 The team will be hosting an informal brown-bag lunch at noon on Monday, December 4 in room 200C of 2195 Hearst to discuss and answer any quesitons about this report. All members of IST or OCIO are welcome.

Museum Informatics Project (MIP) Receives Computerworld Award for Business Intelligence:

MIP received a medal from the Computerworld Honors Program for its Business Intelligence for Scholarly Collections project. The awards were established in 1988 in order to recognize unique uses of information technology for the benefit of society. Debra Kelly, the project technical lead, accepted the Laureate Gold Medal at the awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. on June 5, 2006.

More Information: http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Fall2006/925.html
Project Lead: Debra Kelly, dkelly@berkeley.edu
Manager: Patrick McGrath, patrickm@berkeley.edu
Director: David Greenbaum, dag@berkeley.edu

Social Science Survey Data Gathering Software:

Completion of test version for a new web-based option within CASES; completion of test release for a substantially revised version of CASES (Version 6), which relies on a relational database to store and retrieve all case-specific data instead of the traditional proprietary structure; completion of test release for an entirely new Case Management System (as a part of CASES 6) to be used by both interviewers and managers in survey applications that require distributed (laptop-based) interviews in respondents’ homes.

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