Building novel e-communities

Recently, Lancaster eScience, the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (IEED) and the Northwest Regional Development Agency was awarded JISC funding to develop online communities of business professionals using the Sakai collaborative environment. Called EMBRACE (EManaged Business Relationships and Cohesive Environments), the project builds on the JISC award (CRIB, see blog roll for more detail) and seeks to apply embedded social network functionality that Sakai now contains to develop lasting communicative relations between the public sector (e.g. academic and governmental agencies) and small and medium sized enterprise. The project begins on the 1st of February. EScience would like to take this opportunity to thank collaborators (IEED, Northwest Regional Development Agency) and supporters (Swansea University) for providing the evidence base that led to the successful bid. Without their support new opportunities such as these would not be feasible. I would also like to thank the Sakai development community for providing incentive to developers to keep on producing innovative and new ways of building e-communities. In particular, we would like to thank Steve Swinsburg (Sakai Fellow) for delivery of a new and innovative social networking tool beyond his contractual obligations. I personally would like to thank the development team at Lancaster eScience (Adrian Fish and Dan Robinson) for their sterling work in delivering Sakai to the academic and business communities and supporting the Sakai service provided at Lancaster. For further details of EMBRACE or CRIB please contact me at a.w.robertson@lancaster.ac.uk.