30 Aug 2010 | Borlaug Global Rust Initiative: Forrester Groundswell Award Nomination

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative is a great example of Enterprise 2.0 technology used to support global collaboration aimed at finding and implementing a solution to a complex and urgent problem - as originally envisioned by hypertext pioneer Douglas Engelbart. How urgent? "90 percent of the world's wheat has little or no protection against Ug99 wheat rust. This plant disease could quickly spread and annihilate a crop that provides a third of the world's calories." The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative was formed to reduce the world's vulnerability to wheat rust diseases through a first-ever international collaboration in wheat research. We're happy the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative case has been nominated for Forrester's 2010 GroundSwell award. Please read the Groundswell page on The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative's Knowledge Bank - and add your own rating, comment and review for the BGRI case and others.

From the Outcome section:

In addition to serving its publicly facing mission, the site is the hub for globally distributed scientific data collection and research, with over three hundred researchers using the site every day - and more than twenty five using the site at any time.

The BGRI community has compiled important data quickly, and gotten it into the hands of other researchers, institutions, NGO's and other advocates who share the site. This is in sharp contrast to a global research publication cycle which typically operates in a time frame of months or years rather than days or weeks. This is necessary to combat the UG99 threat which not only spreads rapidly, but also mutates rapidly.

The globalrust.org site helps the BGRI community organize and work faster than the threat.

We're delighted that globalrust.org is powered by Traction® TeamPage - and puts TeamPage's Attivio Advanced Search option to good use for faceted content navigation of research data and papers as well as content search.