The CUNY Academic Commons is an online, academic social network for community members of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Designed to foster conversation, collaboration, and connections among the 24 individual colleges that make up the university system, the site, founded in 2009, has quickly grown as a hub for the CUNY community, serving in the process to strengthen a growing group of digital scholars, teachers, and open-source projects at the university.
As stated in the site's Terms of Service, members "seek to use the Academic Commons as a means of fulfilling our highest aspirations for integrating technology into our teaching, learning, and collaborating."
Information silos vs. shareable knowledge
In their case study of the CUNY Academic Commons, published in On the Horizon, Gold & Otte (2011) note that, prior to the CUNY Academic Commons, little "cross-campus communication" between like-minded faculty and graduate students existed. CUNY was a "loose federation" of campuses, largely represented by static websites. The need for a university-wide means of sharing knowledge was perceived by CUNY Committee on Academic Technology, and discussions began in early 2008 to find a solution.
Nantel (2010), Kaya (2010), and others have similarly observed how information can easily get stuck in institutional "silos". Social networks, like the CUNY Academic Commons, can "help open communications between departments" and improve knowledge transfer (Nantel). While countering the "prospect of missed connections" was a principal reason why the CUNY Academic Commons was formed, serendipitous discovery became a technological goal. Developers of the site (primarily faculty and graduate students) experimented with social media tools to see how best to connect scholars, while not being too intrusive in their daily lives.
Background
Work began in 2008 to create a repository of "learning objects" which could be easily shared and archived, and which were designed to constantly evolve. The Committee on Academic Technology reached out to the various campuses for ideas, and feedback indicated that the site should be "open and organic" and flexible enough to respond to the diverse needs of the faculty. The first beta version of the site was created in February, 2009, and after much tinkering, CUNY Academic Commons was officially launched in December of the same year. The site has seen "rapid adoption". Membership as of May 2011 was nearly 2000, while the number of blogs on the site was close to 400. By 2017, even after deleting inactive users, membership was estimated at 7900. In 2017, undergraduates were allowed to join and by 2022, membership skyrocketed to over 40,000.
From the very beginning, the site was a "space of open experimentation, open communication, and open sharing." A participatory network encourages "peer-to-peer learning among faculty members" and is "a generative platform" which makes "the professoriate of the largest urban public university system in the world more visible to itself and to a wider public," according to Gold & Otte.
In her critique in Yale University’s Collaborative Learning Center blog, Kristjiana Gong (2010) finds several ways CUNY Academic Commons is able to build a "social university": transparency in development and support porous boundaries between users and support at all levels regular communication users are engaged in creating a warmer community
Since funding did not permit a full-service site, a small team of software developers and community facilitators began to shape the Commons with a "self-service approach" in which faculty and graduate students were largely responsible for building their own sites. An open-source model was adopted in which the community as a whole was responsible for testing, defect reporting, and ideas for enhancements.
For a comprehensive history of the Commons, see the timeline "From The Beginning: A Commons Retrospective.".
The CUNY Academic Commons has a strong ethos of giving back to the WordPress and BuddyPress community. Writing for WPMU.org, Siobhan Ambrose (2011) notes that the site has released many significant BuddyPress plug-ins and regularly shares tips and hacks with the BuddyPress network.