The Collaboration Repository project is a repository of research documents, field project information, and authors in the area of 'IT and Development' that will feature user annotations. The project has been designed to service a growing community of individuals from academia, research, non-profits and government who are working in some form in IT and Development. This is an area that is still in its infancy and lacks a reliable central information repository. The repository will have an open structure, encouraging users to add and edit information on projects and research. Initially, it will be monitored by moderators from within the Berkeley community. However, the long-term goal of the repository is to allow users to select their own moderators.

In short, the Collaborative Repository plans to be for the research area of 'IT and Development' what the ACM Digital Library is for Computer Science, except that the Collaborative Repository is meant to be a lot more decentralized. In the first stage, we plan to create the structure for the database and a user interface for annotations. The annotation feature, very important to this system, is meant to allow users to comment on the data items and documents stored in the repository. The overall goal at this stage is to create an open-enough structure so that later improvements are easy to implement.

Jeff is working on his latest economic cooperation plan, involving two well-known organizations. He finds a project in the Collaboration Repository about building a small business in the town of Mbale, Uganda. After reading through the project summary, he clicks on the "View/Hide Annotations" button to view all the annotations. The page refreshes, showing a small icon following any annotated text. Jeff randomly clicks on an icon and a small pop-up window appears, showing a list of all the annotations for that icon in the top half, and the first listed annotation in the lower half of the window. He reads a few of the annotations and finds them useful for expressing short comments and ideas to specific parts of the text. Jeff closes the pop-up window and continues on to the user reviews.

After reading a few user reviews, Jeff decides to add his own annotation to one of them. He selects the text, "NGO strategic planning and organizational development," and clicks on the "Annotate" button. A new window pops up with the text that Jeff has selected as well as some form fields for him to fill in and add his annotation. He fills in all of the fields and types in a short blurb about the program he is currently developing, then clicks "Save." The pop-up window closes and the project page refreshes, showing a small icon following the text that he just annotated. He clicks on the icon and reads through his own annotation. Jeff feels satisfied that he has contributed his knowledge, and found some valuable information for his economic cooperation program as well.

Tamara Sen has been working on a project with her crew of graduate students on creating a GSI map to submersible borewells in rural Bangladesh. Opinions on the use of borewells are highly contentious, especially in the flat plains of Bangladesh, which are areas highly prone to drought. Tamara has a disadvantage in being several thousand miles away from her test bed. Thus, she is very keen on receiving information from the field on what development professionals and planners think about this project.

She goes to the Collaborative Repository and adds the basic information on her project, inserts a short summary, and clicks on a "Request Review" button for her category. By doing this, she ensures that everyone who subscribes to the mailing list for categories such as "/resources/water," "/asia/bangladesh," and "/information_systems/GIS," will know that a new project has been added, and that the project creator is looking for reviews. With the knowledge that she has just opened a Pandora's Box, Tamara waits for the flurry of reviews to be posted to her project. She wonders if she should opt to receive  all the reviews of her project through email reminders.

After endless hours of searching the web for information about healthcare technologies in Colombia, Stephanie has found little credible and relevant information. Realizing she needs a much more trustworthy source, she turns to the Collaboration Repository after hearing a colleague mention that it helped their organization. Stephanie goes to the website of the repository and clicks on "Search." Presented with a set of categories options, along with a specialized keyword search prompt, Stephanie can't contain her smile. She selects the most relevant choices encompassing healthcare and Columbia, types in 'technology' in the keyword prompt, and hits the search button. The search results contain a series of documents and projects from which she can peruse at will. With so many hours saved, Stephanie now has more time to write her PhD thesis.

Shane's Initial Design

Laheem's Initial Design

Joyojeet's Initial Design

"IT and Development" is an emerging area in the field of Development Studies that incorporates academic and field work from a number of disciplines such as Economics, Computer Science, Sociology, Information Management, and Regional Planning. Since it has yet to become an organized subset of any academic discipline, research in this area is scattered and obtained through multiple sources. Consequently, academic researchers must go through a tedious, iterative process of running the same sets of search terms across several generic databases and web sources. Furthermore, IT and Development field workers, or people who are working on location in a developing country, are usually dispersed throughout the world. They do not have easy access to forums, physical or online, to interact and share information with each other or with academia. Since IT and Development is an area of study still in its infancy, case studies are a critical learning tool for field workers. Their field experiences and input are vital in academic research.

The lack of a central repository (akin to ERIC for researchers in Education or the ACM digital library for Computer Scientists), plus the absence of an information exchange forum, creates the need for an open online meeting place where academics and field workers can exchange information and comment on each other's work. This central repository would include both field projects and research documents. It would allow users to easily store information on field projects, document their progress, and make comments on projects and documents. Such an application would be especially useful if layered with a function to allow annotations.

If these annotations can be indexed, they can be more of an asset to users. Users can add or view comments and references which are specific to certain blocks of text. They can define new terms within the text on the website. They will also be able to start new threads of discussion that link into documents. Some key elements to the success of such a system include creating the right mix of openness, to encourage use of the system, devising mechanisms to monitor content, and designing a system that is scalable, which is essential in an area of research that is constantly evolving.

* = optional task

Our long-term goal is to get UC Berkeley to host the site; the affiliation with UC lends a lot of credibility to the service. More importantly, we need to build a critical mass of users as a way to build on the credibility further. For purposes of privacy, we will never display email addresses, and tell users at the point of registration and at the point of adding new content, that any information they add with their names attached to it, can be accessed publicly. Users will also have the option of interacting with the system anonymously.

We also need to mention to users that all information they put on the site must be original and not be restricted by copyright. This initially excludes a large number of journals that do not allow their articles on public forums. We allow users to delete any information they put on the repository by making a request to delete from their profile pages.

IMDB

ThinkCycle.org

Digital Dividend

AiDA Development Gateway