Description
Interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard and elsewhere naturally tend to be distributed geographically, across campuses and departments. Effective collaboration for these programs requires the ability to bridge distance, which in turn implies digital collaboration, and therefore abilities:
- to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives;
- to share, annotate, archive and retrieve digital content;
- to search, browse and annotate joint resources such as laboratory reagents and protocols;
- to provide semantic context to on-line content for more powerful interactions within multiple sub-disciplines;
- to integrate as well as distinguish the individual contributions of many scienctfic workers
IIC and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) are co-developing a web-based “social technology” framework for this kind of advanced digital scientific collaboration between the constituent laboratories and cores of HSCI. This framework will be based on reusable open-source components and is intended to be generalizable across other Harvard Inter-Faculty Initiatives (IFIs), as well as other scientific research “collaboratories” on an international scale.
We believe such a framework can significantly improve the productivity of research in Harvard’s emerging large-scale interdisciplinary research enterprises.
