Engaging responses to emerging technologies
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This project sought to institutionalise Talks.cam, a novel system at the University of Cambridge created by academics, but with potential value to the whole institution. Talks.cam was designed as a clearing house of user-generated event information, to help academics easily publicise seminars they organise, and to learn about scholarly events which they might be interested in.
Executive Summary
From its origins as a grassroots software experiment created by academics, Talks.cam now has been successfully and completely absorbed into CARET, an innovation unit within the University which supports teaching, learning and research activity. This is the first such service handover within Cambridge and as such is a great achievement for this modest project. The example of Talks.com is being used as an exemplar project in discussions concerning the general approach of the University to fostering IT innovation. The potential ramifications are considerable, but not yet fully explored, possibly leading to reorganisation of the IT units of the University. The learning from this project about the detailed stages of institutionalisation will be invaluable to future efforts, for which system and process evolution and handover is an essential process to ensure success and sustainability for valuable technology projects.
Talks.cam is now heavily used throughout the University and beyond in the Cambridge area. Using June 2009 to illustrate Talks.cam usage at the end of the project, we see almost 100,000 user logins during that month, with an average of 101,664 site hits per day. The importance of the system (and its successful integration into the institutional IT infrastructure) is illustrated by Talks.cam events information being included in over 40 different websites within the university, including high profile departmental webpages.
Interdisciplinary and thematic research is of ever-growing importance within the university, and with external partners, and is well supported by Talks.cam, which enables relevant events to be drawn together. Researchers across conventional departmental and group boundaries can find seminars they are interested in where ever they might occur within the university, and through this can meet and get to know other academics with related interests. This is a huge improvement over the previous methods of publicising talks and lectures, which were rarely able to attract anyone outside the immediate department where they were held. The added value of Talks.cam to research is substantial.
At the outset of the project, we anticipated integrating Talks.cam into the wider IT infrastructure of the university through the use of OpenSocial. This would have involved various individual IT services being able to connect to each other in a “social” way via the OpenSocial APIs, supporting an increasingly people-centric and integrated environment within the university intranet. While an OpenSocial gadget remains on the roadmap for Talks.cam, it has become clear that a better path for full institutional integration of Talks.cam into an academic networking context might be through building Talks functionality into the institutional virtual learning and research environment (CamTools/ Sakai). The details of how this will work have yet to be finally resolved, and may involve the complete reworking of Talks.cam functionality within the CamTools platform, a continuing standalone system but with new interfaces to CamTools, or a mixture of the two. The prospect of CamTools integraton was not expected, but has been adapted to by the project team and it promises a rich and interesting future for Talks.cam within Cambridge and potentially beyond.
The project has also fostered interest and confidence in user-generated content at Cambridge. Talks.cam is the first large scale system to rely on end users supplying accurate and useful information, and has shown that this can work well and effectively. It has given credibility to the idea of letting users take the lead on content creation, and this is reflected in a number of new local initiatives, including projects by the Office of External Affairs and Communications where university staff and students are empowered to create short films about the university for public distribution on institutional websites.
Outside Cambridge, the project has spurred interest in events syndication and the benefits this can bring to researchers and research outputs as a whole. As well as other universities and organisations (such as the British Neuroscience Association) who are now working with CARET to explore how best to get a Talks system for their own use, we are continuing to investigate how a national research seminar listings system might work. This could be a larger scale Talks system with events tagged with locale information, or a gateway to a number of federated Talks instances in individual institutions. We look forward to potentially working with JISC and others to bring the power of Talks.cam to a much wider audience in this way, and to expand the area within which researchers can find events and people with the potential to enhance their work.