I’m hooked! I came across the link to Academici a couple of days ago, and went in to have a look. I soon registered an account and went exploring the site – wow!
Academici – “The Vitural Academy” – offers you the chance of extending networks and tapping into the know-how of your peers in and across disciplines, it offers a wide variety of academic services and acts as a key resource base for academic and academic-related work. The virtual academy is aimed specifically at the academic world . The key characteristics of academici are:
– global peer to peer network
– very precise search engine
– sophisticated yet simple to use communication platform
– professional contact management system
– content-driven fora run by experts
– academic -related services on one platform
– secure data protection, no advertising, no direct sales, no spam
The day I became a member I logged on – there was a list of the 5 most recent new members, and to my surprise, 4 of them were from New Zealand! Looks like I’m not the only one from Godzone who has seen this.
What impresses me is the interface – intuitive, and easy to use – provides each member with a personal web page, lots of tools to make managing your participation in the site really straightforward, and a well thought out process of establishing and maintaining forums and interest groups. Within a day of joining I received an invitation to join one of the current discussions – all very personalised.
If you’re working in an academic environment, or if you’re interested in online community architecture, this is definitely worth a look around.
Dear Derek,
thanks for this charming comment on your blog. Just a few weeks since your text, the New Zealand community alone as grown to 125 members and academici is already a major contact hub for bringing together scholars from all around the world and disciplines. It has already created PhD-studentships, supversior-relations, joint projects, joint hubs, major academic publishers are members (Palgrave Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Elsevier, Intellectbook, Peter Lang …) and you can access easily CEOs from Organisations and companies around the world. Even large Blue Chips have discovered academici and run their HR-academic communities with it (like L’Or??al). So – just spread the message and enjoy coming. We are really a dedicated, personalizing team who work not with numbers, but people as members,
yours
Markus