Research into the adoption and use of ICTs, Web 2.0, Cloud and e-collaboration technologies

Sakai Unity Unity is a Sakai service that the Lancaster Centre for eScience are working on as part of our JISC (UK) funded project, Collaborative Research in Business (CRIB). Whereas search is a resource finder, Unity is a people finder and an e-community builder, and that is probably the best way to summarise its purpose. Unity is being designed to provide members or worksites the ability to search other members, even though they are not associated by any common worksite. As part of Unity we also explore linking more than one Sakai installation, so that Unity can function across multiple institutions that would take advantage of all searchable data across institutions, identify people with similar or complimentary interests, and create worksites populated with collaboration tools for matched people to use. Unity will work with Profile2 in that matched people will have the opportunity to add the users suggested by Unity to their personal connection list. The CRIB project is concerned with developing and deploying Profile2 and Unity to business owner managers across the north of England as part of university third mission activities. We anticipate two thousand owner managers will be engaged into the service before mid-2012. We will examine, using market research approaches, how Sakai is taken up and used, and whether the development of meaningful relationships between business owners, academics and support staff are in any way facilitated by the use of tools such as online fora and social networking. Unity fits into this research agenda thus: How frequently do people connected together by automated systems form meaningful collaborations? As Dr. Seuss stated in 'The Lorax', "Business is business"; we are hopeful that some of our findings and tools may be directly transferable to other institutions focussing on engaging with business, but also in other e-community building initiatives beyond the business world.