SciSpace

NIEeS hosts a social networking site for scientists called SciSpace, built using Elgg software. The site supports collaboration by offering facilities including blogs and comments, wikis, social bookmarking, and file spaces for both individuals and groups.

Individuals can record their thoughts, plans, results and reflections, and they can choose to keep it private, make it public, or available to a set of SciSpace members specified by them. The access controls are very well developed and fine-grained.

A group of people can create a community with its own shared blog, wiki, file space and so on. Although we first thought communities would be groups of scientists working on a project together, we have found SciSpace useful also for supporting the relationship between students and supervisor, and for colleagues working on administrative tasks. We think most collaborative work can be supported. Communities are easily created by users (not administrators) and members can join or create as many as they need to reflect all of their interests. If necessary, membership of a community can be restricted by its owner (the creator).

Members of the site can discover others with similar interests in several ways. Each member has a profile where they can record their interests and skills. It is also easy, and beneficial, to add "tags" to each item added to the site; these are keywords and form the basis of the search mechanism built in to the software.

SciSpace delivers information to members dependent on the interests they have registered - by making "friends" and joining communities - but it can also act as an aggregator of RSS feeds specified by the user, including internal feeds from SciSpace itself and external from any source on the internet.