ORION wants researchers and educators to re-think how they collaborate with colleagues, by introducing new social and professional networking tools and resources to its members.

ORION is launching O3, a new web-based collaboration service for researchers and educators. ORION recently previewed the new platform at the Discovery '09 conference, and will be travelling to institutions across Ontario to demonstrate how to use it.

Introduced as a new value-added service for member institutions, O3 helps deliver on ORION's mandate of supporting Ontario's research and education community. O3 seeks to encourage collaboration, the sharing of ideas and research results, and connecting with colleagues across academic disciplines. It is a unique professional networking and collaboration platform developed by and for the research and education community.

"O3 is a place where researchers and educators can connect to the minds and resources they need to work faster and more effectively," says Gary Hilson, ORION's Projects and Alliances Consultant. "We invite early adopters, principal investigators and project leaders to sign up their research teams so that groups can work together online."

Available at no cost to researchers, students and educators at ORION-connected institutions, O3 aims to become the "go-to" place to find colleagues and experts, share ideas, gain feedback from different academic perspectives on early research, build communities of interest, and work with team members online. Users can share, review and edit documents, post photos and videos for comment, create blogs, Wikis, forums and events calendars, all in one online location that also features powerful professional networking tools.

Any researcher, educator or student based at an ORION-connected institution is welcome to form a community on O3 and may invite others to join their community, even from outside Ontario. ORION encourages principal investigators and research team leaders to sign up and invite team members onto O3.

Over the next several weeks, members of the ORION community may notice the O3 logo at various spring conferences and events, including:

• Advancing Learning: This Is IT, May 20 - 22 at George Brown College
• SHARCNET Research Day, May 21 at the University of Waterloo
• University of Windsor Campus Technology Day on May 21
• Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC), May 24 - 26 at Ryerson University
• High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS), June 14 - 17 in Kingston
• Interacting with Immersive Worlds conference, June 15 and 16 at Brock University

A presentation about O3 was held at the Advancing Learning conference on May 21 and an interactive workshop will be hosted at the ABEL Summer Institute at York University on August 24.

Stay tuned for announcements of O3 webinars and on-site demonstrations coming to your institution or region. If you would like to request a demo at your institution, please contact gary.hilson@orion.on.ca.

Visit www.othree.ca for more information and to sign up.