Collaboration and Presented at Midwest Regional Conferences

Led by Lake Forest College, Chicago-area academic, cultural, and civic institutions are developing VBI, the Virtual Burnham Initiative, with 3D models re-creating the 1909 Plan of Chicago housed on a project website. VBI is a project about the Chicagoland community that builds community between academic institutions, area organizations, and the greater public through technology.

Academic IT leaders have much to learn from IT leaders in other businesses and organizations. The Duluth Area CIOs Consortium has members from local business, health care, government, and education. This session will describe the consortium's establishment, goals, and meeting structure, as well as the benefits of membership.

This session will use the InfoCommons at Northwestern Library as a case study to examine a very successful partnership in technology application and space planning between two high-profile campus entities.

All dozen institutions comprising the CIC recently decided to join the InCommon Federation. This session will describe the motivation for and experience of joining InCommon. We'll also describe some of the use cases, including interactions with the federal government, interinstitutional access, and community source development projects.

UW–Madison successfully managed a large IT project using a new collaborative development methodology. The goal was to bring the product to life quickly with fewer bugs and greater input from both functional and technical people. This methodology impacted our organization in unexpected ways. We'll share successes and lessons learned.

Institutions of higher education are complex, decentralized organization that benefit from the individual expertise of their members. Institutional decentralization, however, can hamper cross-campus collaborations. This presentation will focus on understanding how institutional frameworks unknowingly sidetrack collaborations and the steps that can be taken to minimize these barriers.