Industry and Academia: A Foot in Each World

I started working at UCSF as a Technical Architect in February 2009. This was a new direction for me, as my professional background has not been with education or health sciences. Sure, like many in my field I'd had the occasional contract for cranking out code for a health related company and even once developed a system for UCOP as a contractor, but finance and marketing were primarily the industries I knew. However, academia is sort of it's own separate world. I found that as a developer in finance, or marketing, or whatever-idea-you-want.com'ing, that being a developer put you in a common group of developers and technologist that were not defined by their various industries. A java developer in finance and a java developer in telecommunications are still both java developers and they tend to go to the same conferences, follow the same advances in the technology, and do somewhat similar things.

At UCSF, things were different. The language was even different. Instead of being engineers or IT staff, we're now Informatics. The conferences are aligned primarily with health science and secondarily with technology. You see this with the AMIA conferences as well as the CTSA IKFC conferences (and you can look those terms up yourself).

So..., why does any of that matter to this blog? Because, it is the primary source of both opportunity as well as conflict in moving ideas from one arena (such as industry) over to the other arena (academia), and this can flow in both directions. Ideas from industry can sometimes take a while to be adopted by academia even though they add seemingly obvious value. On the other hand, what works for industry does not always work for academia because academia is just a different world. The users are different, and best practices elsewhere can sometimes backfire with researchers and professors.

We think OpenSocial is in the first camp: it's a great idea from industry that just makes too much sense not to work for academia. Especially with the recent work in building and connecting "research networking tools" at various institutions.