Posted by Rose Rocchio, Director of Education and Collaboration Technology, UCLA. What do you do when you have a great new idea that you think would help your department, campus or even the system? How do you pitch it to your colleagues? How do you find collaborators to help you implement the idea?
If UCCSC is coming up (which it is, August 16-18), then you are in luck, because it is a conference like no other. It abounds with engaged and willing collaborators, who all serve the same mission, and even the same governing body – the UC Regents! You can share code, find great teams to join and connect over difficult problems and innovative solutions!
However, what if your idea strikes the week after UCCSC? Bummer! You have to wait a whole year before you will have the opportunity to engage your system counterparts.The UC IT Leadership Council’s Collaborative Technology Group (CTG) has been working on a new concept that will shake things up, even “disrupt” the annual collaboration cycle. Hoping to change the way UC technologists connect and share ideas, CTG has come up with a solution to connect more than once per year.
CTG believes that at UC, we should not just be thinking about collaborating better, we ought to be riding a whole new wave of collaboration momentum, using a platform known as UC NeXt!
So, what is UC NeXt?
UC NeXt is an IT crowd-sourced movement to bring about more UC system collaboration, more innovative ideation, and more IT community camaraderie towards the shared UC mission of excellence in education, research and service.
The concept was first presented to the ITLC in the fall of 2014 and an alpha demo was provided February 2015.
Now, the launch of the Beta version of the system is happening at UCCSC 2015.
What does the UC NeXt Platform do?
The UC NeXt Platform will allow passionate and inspired technologists grow their innovative projects and ideas into broader systemwide collaborations. IT staff can “like” ideas, offer comments to improve them, and even volunteer their time towards helping grow them. Project managers can search for specific expertise across the entire UC system. Engineers can engage with projects they are passionate about and build their reputation. For more information about UC NeXt, please feel free to contact me.
Awesome sauce!!!