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About Us Community Network Services |
Community Network ServicesThe challenge of the Community Network Services (CNS) group is to create new tools and methods to support the delivery of knowledge-based services. As the name implies, we’re focused on methods that can be used by individuals and by independent organizations that may collaborate with each other to deliver needed services—not on giant corporations or government agencies that can dictate standards and invest in heavy-weight systems. The development of effective tools is itself a community-based activity. Every knowledge-based service has its own special characteristics, so tool developers need to be deeply-embedded in the communities they serve. We work with a non-profit organization called Unamesa.org to allow tool-developers to share their results under terms of their own choosing. 
Our research methodology is also community based: each CNS project brings together professional practitioners (people who deliver services), technologists (people who create the tools to support service delivery), researchers (people who study the effectiveness of the tools), and users (the people being served). In other words, we do experiments in real life, not tucked away in a research laboratory. By way of illustration: one recent project focused on an informal network of public agencies that collaborate to deliver child care services. Record sharing—private, secure, and locally controlled—is an important part of this collaboration. Up to now, this has been done by the time-consuming, effort-duplicating method of moving paper and re-entering data. CNS created a much more efficient solution that supports digital record sharing with greater security, access control and reliability, based on the existing practices of sharing paper. This method of exchanging secure records does not rely on any centralized authority to dictate standards and provides significant improvements with minimal investments in technology, IT staff, and training. These services continue to be developed on a sustainable base at SharedRecords.org.
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© 2007 Ricoh Innovations Incorporated |
