DCU News
News at DCU

DCU crowdsourcing ideas for its future direction

University to host 24 hour public online brainstorming session to inform new strategic plan


Dublin City University is embarking on an innovative initiative which will see the university’s staff, students, alumni and key stakeholders take part in an online discussion to help shape the next phase of the university’s development.  

DCU Fuse will take place from Thursday 30th to Friday 31st March and is expected to gather opinions and ideas on a holistic approach to areas such as student life, graduate employability, how to mainstream diversity across all campuses, research priorities and the opportunities and threats faced by international events such as Brexit.  

The conversation will be opened up to the university’s 17,000 students, 1,200 staff and 80,000 graduates and members of the public with an interest in the university including business and local community.  The brainstorming will get underway on Thursday 30th March at 11am with an online discussion with Richard Bruton, TD, Minister for Education & Skills.

DCU President, Professor Brian MacCraith explained the genesis of the project,

“DCU has undergone fundamental transformation over the last few years.  As the fastest growing university now in the country, spread across five campuses and with a new Institute of Education, we now stand at a crossroads in our history.  DCU Fuse provides the university family and friends with an opportunity to play an active role in shaping our future direction.  This online brainstorming event will enable us to capture the views, ideas and aspirations of all our community and to extract these to inform and enhance the university’s new strategy to 2022 and beyond.  The wide-ranging conversations will cover the broad role of the university and its contribution to society.”   

The proprietary platform behind DCU Fuse has been developed by ADAPT, the SFI-funded research centre which focusses on developing next-generation digital content technologies that transform how people communicate.  Based on an open source discussion platform used by the likes of Twitter, Sitepoint, Github and Cisco, DCU researchers have created a robust application that will connect the university with its stakeholders in a dynamic way, supporting multiple parallel online conversations and analysing the data gathered during the 24 hours exercise.

DCU Fuse will be live for 24 hours from 11am on Thursday 30th March.  To take part in the conversation, register at www.dcufuse.ie.

Click here to watch more about DCU Fuse.