About the Collaborative Tools Project

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The Collaborative Tools Project (CTP) was created to help improve collaboration at the University of York, within departments, between departments and with collaborators at other universities by providing tools such as wikis, blogs, file-sharing and forums to all. This project will not be targeted at students or look to replace existing services such as Calendar, Email, CMS or the VLE, but will integrate with them.

Gathering requirements and evaluation

The requirements gathering phase identified some key needs, including:
  • Project workgroup, e.g sharing files and project reports with blogs
  • Community of Practice, e.g publishing to and collaborating with a wider community
  • Meeting Support, e.g making documentation and discussion easier
  • Collaborative Editing, e.g working on a funding bid document with six colleagues from around the world
  • Sharing Best Practice, e.g grassroots knowledge about what works and what doesn't with social media tools and corporate advice about the usage of external tools such as Google Docs, Facebook or Academia.edu
  • Real-time collaboration, e.g instant messaging, conferencing and virtual meetings
  • Knowledge bases, e.g capturing knowledge and knowhow easily
We have trailed a number of tools, including:
  • SocialText
  • Elgg
  • Jive
  • LifeRay Social Office
  • BuddyPress
  • Confluence
  • Mike2.0
and many others evaluating them against the above needs and by how much people use them.

The current trial status

198 people are helping us to trial a tool called Cyn.in in greater detail, working on projects, sharing information and feeding into the ongoing development process helping us to shape the tools to fit the University's mixed collaborative needs. Having evaluated a lot of tools with lots of people, we are now aiming to roll out a much longer, more focussed trial engaging more people in more projects, supporting them as we go.

Getting involved

If you are interested in assembling a team of people in an online workspace, please get in touch with Tom Smith, tas509@york.ac.uk, 01904 43 3847 to discuss what you need or just to find out more general information.

You can explore our collaborative space at https://collaborate.york.ac.uk - please contact Tom (see above) to arrange access.

The team

  • Tom Smith (Collaborative Software Specialist)
  • Jo Casey (Information Officer)
  • Max Spicer (Web Systems Administrator/Developer)
  • John Cooper (Web Systems Administrator/Developer)
  • Dan Wiggle (Web Content Officer)
  • Arthur Clune (IT Security Specialist)
  • Anthony Leonard (System Integrator)
  • Gustav Delius (Mathematical physicist with an interest in dynamic and stochastic networks)
  • Jing Wood (External Relations)
  • Dave Surtees (Head of Support Services)
  • Julie Allinson (Digital Library)
  • Alistair Knock (Planning)