Strategy for academic-community collaboration : Enabled and supported by the development of an open-source web service

To cope with the challenges of economic turbulence in many small communities in U.S. and other parts of the world, this paper aims to propose an academic-community collaboration strategy to improve education, enhance workforce development, foster social community development, and facilitate economic development in a community. Based on the Design Science framework, the proposed academic-community collaboration strategy is presented based on the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach and value-chain analysis, and supported by our proposed open-source IT infrastructure, including a showcase of web service called Community Development Collaboration Service (CDCS). This web service functions as a central portal that identifies available services and resources, disseminate areas of needs, and then match the resources and the needs appropriately and efficiently within a community, with the support and promotion from local universities that the community can trust. Our preliminary survey findings suggest that most of the potential users find the overall content quality and perceived usefulness of the CDCS good or excellent. Implications, limitations and future improvement of the CDCS are presented in the paper.