Nick Vidal

We are currently building UFRGSWeb, UFRGS‘ rich-media social network, to be launched next year. UFRGS is one of the largest universities in Brazil, with over 40.000 people. Being so large, it’s difficult to be aware of all the interesting research being developed at the university. Our goal is to provide students and professors with tools that will help them discover and share information with colleagues and society. To achieve this goal, we are creating a symbioses of Orkut and YouTube from an academic perspective. We are adopting the ISS open standard so that information may be discovered, syndicated and aggregated easily. The system is being built on top of Drupal, an excellent open source content management system. I’m very happy to be part of this project and to being able to contribute back to my university and to society. I think this is a very important project that will help improve the quality of education and research at UFRGS with phenomenal cascading effects.