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Hybrid Environments for Universities

https://www.steelcase.com/eu-en/research/articles/topics/education/hybrid-environments-universities/

a good write up about a Book Sprint we did for “Hybrid Environments for Universities: A shared commitment to campus innovation and sustainability.”

In the beginning of March 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Europe, nine international experts from Germany, Sweden, Finland and Netherlands met in an education pop-up space from Steelcase Education to discuss a research question and to write a book in five days. The result of this joint adventure at Technical University (TU) Berlin is the handbook and manifesto “Hybrid Environments for Universities: A shared commitment to campus innovation and sustainability.”

The book was written in a collaborative process, a Book Sprint, that captures the knowledge and expertise of several writers who share authorship and a collective voice. The sprint process relied on high commitment from all the participants, strong facilitation, a dedicated working space supporting agile working and a fast publishing process.

Joining the EIFL Management Board

I am very honored to join the EIFL management board. This happily augments my desire to do more work outside of North America and Western Europe.

https://www.eifl.net/management

“EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) is a not-for-profit organization that works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America.”

https://www.eifl.net/page/about

A few years ago Coko started building a Journal platform called xpub-collabra. The naming convention was inline with the early work done on journal systems built with PubSweet. We also had xpub-elife (later Libero-reviewer) and xpub-hindawi (later phenom).

We paused the dev of it for a bit because we needed to switch focus to Editoria. Now we have some time to look at xpub-collabra again. It has been renamed ‘Kotahi’ and is very close to an initial, usable, release.

This is a modern publishing platform. Themeable, live chat, editable docs, configurable submission forms and much more. It will cope with an initial publishing interface though we will work towards a secondary interface which is more sophisticated, and build out options for integrations. In addition, and interestingly, the workflow is designed so that the system could be used by Journals, micropublications or preprints alike. We’ll publish more about this on the Coko site soon.