Last week York’s KM Unit co-hosted an Open House to demonstrate ORION‘s (Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network) new online professional networking and collaboration platform O3. “Introduced as a new value-added service for member institutions, O3 helps deliver on ORION’s mandate of supporting Ontario’s research and education community. O3 seeks to encourage collaboration, the sharing of ideas and research results, and connecting with colleagues across academic disciplines. It is a unique professional networking and collaboration platform developed by and for the research and education community (ORION newsletter, May 2009). ”
Gary Hilson, ORION’s Projects and Alliances Consultant, was on hand to give attendees an overview of the platform and its various features, which include a number of Web 2.0 tools such as member profiles, user created blogs, wikis, discussion forums, as well as document management. ResearchImpact is currently exploring how we can use the O3 platform to facilitate and foster collaboration between KM brokers and researchers. David Phipps of ResearchImpact said, “Social networking is an important, emerging tool for knowledge mobilization. As our work naturally connects people over distance and time, a robust social networking platform with features that allow us to connect and collaborate with partners will enhance the KM services that York can offer it’s graduate students, research and their partners.” Omar Mohammed, Manager of Research Computing at York, stated, “We are pleased that ResearchImpact has taken the initiative to explore O3 as a collaboration platform for research and knowledge mobilization. The O3 initiative leverages the ORION research network and we will follow the emergence of O3 with interest.” The Open House was attended by over 20 people including York faculty and staff members, students working in a number of York’s Organized Research Units, as well as representatives from the York Region community.
If you are interested in more information about O3, please contact Gary Hilson at gary.hilson@orion.on.ca.