"Commons in a Box" & the Importance of Open Academic Networks | Inside Higher Ed

"Last week, the City University of New York (CUNY) unveiled its plans to create a "Commons in a Box," an open-source toolkit to help colleges and universities "roll their own" academic networks. The project will help replicate CUNY's Academic Commons at other schools. The Academic Commons was founded in 2009, an effort to help connect the faculty, administration, and grad students across the 23 colleges in the CUNY system and to help combat "information silos" -- something that exists, as CUNY exemplifies, even under one university system. "The free exchange of knowledge among colleagues across the university is central to better educating the student body and expanding professional development opportunities for faculty research and teaching," CUNY's project contends...."