Designing a Social Matching System to Connect Academic Researchers with Local Community Collaborators

Abstract

This paper reports on efforts to design a social matching system that instigates collaborative research across multiple fields of practice, in this instance: researchers from academia and organizations in their local geographic community. A qualitative study is presented about university researchers and the design of their profile pages for the system. Findings show that university researchers prefer profile page designs that enable them to demonstrate a willingness to adapt to non-academic partners, such as by de-emphasizing esoteric markers of expertise like scholarly publications and clarifying their resources and goals. Some also wish to circumvent potential bias by omitting information about their name, physical appearance, and academic department. However, these desired omissions raise questions about how to design for sufficient distinction between profile pages and the presentation of a unique professional identity. Implications are discussed for the design of social marching systems for collaboration.