Submitted by Mike Roy

Dear Colleagues,

At the upcoming NITLE Summit, Bob Keift from Occidental College and I will be leading a session called ‘Envisioning Transinstitutional Work in the Age of the Cloud’ where we want to focus our collective attention on opportunities for doing our work in new ways that leverage technology and new and sometimes cloud-based models for providing services. We hope to focus on five such opportunities. Which five? We don’t know yet! That’s where you come in. We’ve set up a forum at http://doteducloudward.uservoice.com and a blog at http://doteducloudward.blogspot.com where you can tell us your thoughts on these matters. What are specific collaborations and  business models that you are presently involved in and/or would like to see come into being, and would like to see discussed at our session? We’ve seeded the list with a few ideas of our own, some of which involve the cloud and some of which are older ideas perhaps more possible now within this new paradigm:  cooperative collection development, shared ERP, outsourced high-performance scientific computing, warchest for open source development, and others. Please take 20 minutes in the next few weeks to review the list, vote on which topic you would like to see discussed, add new topics that others can vote on, and even volunteer to lead a discussion on one of the topics. And since this is one of those ‘wisdom of crowds’ efforts, feel free to share broadly with your colleagues.