SLNet 2.0: Serious Networking in Universities. A New Platform Based on Clustorization

Abstract

In professional environments, collaboration contributes to the growth of the activity. Enterprise social networks seek the automation of collaboration by providing a common workspace for users, with a transversal visibility of the skills, the activities and the collaboration opportunities. In this work, we propose developing an academic social network in the spirit of enterprise social network, in order to automate the creation of collaboration opportunities between the students of a same institution. The grouping criteria’s will be based on the users personal information and their activities history. Developing an academic social network was motivated by the increasing interest of the academic actors to social media as a communication tool, and the negative assumptions on the social network impact on the productivity and on the privacy of personal data. A first version of the social platform was developed and presented in EDUCON 2016 under the Name SLNet. The SLNet 2.0 is the second version of the social platform with a special focus on the improvement of the grouping engine by reducing the searching set of collaborators by an intermediate clustorization of the users.