SURFconext

Modern universities are developing towards loose conglomerates of (inter)discipline expertise that has a high degree of connectedness with society in the broader sense. 21st century universities may also be regarded as ‘knowledge servers’ in which a number of communities create, share, publish and apply knowledge. Learning and research, in other words, is becoming a community-wide activity. In order to support the formation and development of academic communities, the University of Amsterdam has tailored the community (open) source collaboration and learning platform Sakai (http://www.sakaiproject.org) and created an integrated community system that meets basic requirements for community support, UvA Communities

UvA Communities aims to place this important observation in the context of the 21st century University, by creating a ubiquitous community platform that is able to stage a number of different communities and users, including individuals from outside university. Within one system, users can become a member of one or more communities, and communities may be formed around a number of topics, ranging from a general field of studies or research to an ad hoc problem area or course sites for an innovative educational setting

The context and principal aim of the COIN & UvA Communities use case is to provide a collaboration service that users from multiple organizations are able to use.   It’s very purpose is to allow people from outside the university organization to connect within the realm of the university and to give insiders means to easily connect outside university, all having access to the same set of tools and services, which are extensible with tailor-made functionality. People from many different cultural and scientific backgrounds collaborate on a variety of topics and take on multiple roles in multiple communities.

Its relationship with COIN is obvious. The COIN infrastructure provides the perfect layer to facilitate user access and multiple ad hoc group relationships for users from multiple organizations to work, learn and share in a true collaboration spirit using the UvA Communities (Sakai) platform. The COIN infrastructure provides also a platform to interconnect UvA Communities functionalities as widget or gadget services in other platforms based on the OpenSocial adoption & implementation in COIN.

An important partner for the University of Amsterdam is Edia (http://www.edia.nl). This Amsterdam based company has in depth knowledge of the Sakai platform. The tools needed to integrate COIN and UvA Communities (Sakai) will be built by Edia in cooperation with the UvA and SURFnet. Our goal is a working integration by the end of this year.