A Fire Under Embers

Recently, I saw a “tweet” to an article reporting that Harvard professors were banding together to push their research to the Internet. Well, ok!

While it’s great to put their stuff in the “open”, this barely scratches the surface of the talent — or the output — at Harvard. What about the thousands of Harvard undergrad, graduate students, and staff who constantly write as well? Their work is invaluable as additions to the “conversation,” if not to scholarship.

I use Harvard here both specifically – I’m interested in the place because I trained and work here — but also as a marker for any community with a distinguishing niche or competency, and certainly research institutions.

What’s the problem? There exists huge untapped potential to see, use and advance research going on around the University. Today it lies behind the boundaries of Harvard’s stand-alone schools, and locked into statuses like “student” or “staff”.

That potential represents the University’s greatest assets: its brains and its reputation.

How would we specify/launch a social media capability for Harvard where any student, faculty or staff could post papers, do crowd research, share bookmarks – and collaborate across the boundaries of the schools and statuses?

I’m seeing this, initially, as focused on the professional schools — HKS, HBS, HLS, HSPH, HDS — and on the policy arenas they all touched. I’d see climate, health, national security, for example  as “verticals”, and leadership, technology, regulation, for example, as “horizontals” – though in social media and “socnet” terms I’m not sure how these hold up!

It would be great to create the effect of having cobbled together attributes of existing social media applications, like Twitter, Slideshare, YouTube, Ma.Gnolia/Delicious, Wiki, Alltop, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook.

What’s the architecture that does that? How to stitch them together? How to put a string around the community as “Harvard” so that that credential defined the boundary?

Yes, we could add other research institutions, making it a powerhouse.

Does Friendfeed offer a solution, as per this from “socnet” strategist Chris Brogan?

It would be great to sketch this out.