CUNY Plans to Share Social Network Tools That Break Down Silos

Over the next year, the City University of New York will develop software tools that allow universities to easily configure, customize and control an open-source academic social network.

With a $107,500 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, the CUNY Academic Commons staff will create an ongoing development community, an alpha version of the Commons in a Box software, and a beta version of a network for the Modern Language Association.

Keep reading to find out why the university system developed an academic social network, what technical challenges lie ahead for Commons in a Box and the vision CUNY has for this project.

Why CUNY created an open-source academic network

Two years ago, CUNY developed and launched a social network, CUNY Academic Commons, for faculty, staff, administrators and graduate students that's housed in the CUNY Graduate Center.

This social network gives people on its 23 campuses a virtual space to connect, collaborate and create a digital library of their resources, said George Otte, CUNY director of academic technology and associate dean of academic affairs of the CUNY School of Professional Studies at the Graduate School and University Center.

In groups like CUNY Games, people focused primarily on pedagogy, computer programming or design issues come together. Typically they wouldn't know where to look for collaborators outside of their department or campus.

"We're all more or less literally a subway ride or a bus ride away from each other, but it isn't that easy to get together, so we wanted to have a space for collaboration,"  Otte said.

Through the leadership of Matthew K. Gold and Boone Gorges, the open-source social network took off. As users requested different features and reported bugs, developers created plug-ins for WordPress and BuddyPress that would meet their needs.

"While we are very much open in all the senses, there's a reason for everything that we do, and it's really not ideological," Otte said.

The team members didn't want academic discussions to take place in a space that's mined for advertising or a space they couldn't control, said Gold, director of the CUNY Academic Commons as well as advisor to the provost for Master's Programs & Digital Initiatives and assistant English professor at the New York City College of Technology.

For example, when Ning stopped offering a no cost option to its social network, educators had to pay or move their groups elsewhere.

"If you as an institution are investing time and energy in customizing something, it behooves you to have some control over the platform itself," Gold said.

Without control over a platform, academic freedom could be limited, said Gorges, lead developer for the Academic Commons. The university has a responsibility to create spaces that are flexible, unconfined and provide many ways for people to connect.

"I think it's part of the central duty of the university to provide these spaces," Gorges said. "If they don't, then they're not doing their job."

2 technical challenges of developing the software

But providing these spaces takes work, in-house expertise and staff investment, Gold said. Not every university wants to make those investments, though many universities regularly contact the Academic Commons team about its network.

And CUNY's system isn't easy to reproduce, said Gorges, one of three main contributors to the BuddyPress development community and a major developer in the WordPress community.

His development team built the Academic Commons on the WordPress platform and created plug-ins for BuddyPress and WordPress that add features to the platform.

These plug-ins are mutually dependent in a lot of ways. And one of the big technical challenges to the Commons in a Box project is activating the correct plug-ins at the same time.

In the Academic Commons, this requires manual work and coding. For Commons in a Box, his team is writing code that will handle much of this logic.

On a dashboard panel, staff members would select features they want. Then the core infrastructure would activate the pieces they need at the same time.

Another challenge involves creating a full-featured wiki platform for WordPress. The CUNY Academic Commons currently uses MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, and put a number of hacks in place that make different pieces of software work together.

He wants to jettison MediaWiki and reproduce wiki-like features inside the WordPress platform that are built for academic use. In these spaces, users will be able to collaborate on documents, easily revise the history tab of wiki pages and organize them by tags and categories.

What CUNY hopes to accomplish through Commons in a Box

These common spaces can break down silos in universities, Gold said.

But "I think there's a danger of each of these common spaces, as more institutions build them, becoming silos in and of themselves."

He envisions a constellation of collaborative common spaces that will help scholars, academics and people working at nonprofits do their work. If someone's a member of two different commons like CUNY and MLA, that person should be able to have their information in both spaces without typing it twice, he said.

These common spaces could help universities rethink the relationship between developers and users. Instead of a chasm dividing universities from vendors or university developers from users, they would join the two on a continuum.

Users could take part in the development process by suggesting features and reporting bugs. And developers could be legitimate users. That way, tool building will become part of a scholarly collaboration process, Gorges said.

"I'm hoping that the Commons in a Box project, and especially the open-source community that we're hoping to kick-start around it, will play a role in maybe taking these lessons that we've learned at CUNY and helping to make that more of a trend throughout the world of higher education."