The ETH Alumni Knowledge Network is live!

The Knowledge Network is the first alumni community in the world enhanced by the power of AI to connect its members and enable them to seamlessly exchange academic, industry and life experiences and offer mentoring in their careers, as well as providing an ideal platform for networking.

This is a unique chance to access the combined brainpower of hundreds of graduates of one of the top universities in the world, and network with some of the most prominent professionals in Switzerland and across the globe.

Project Overview

The ETH Alumni Knowledge Network project has been in the works for several months, under the leadership of Board Member Daniel Naeff and Community Strategist Camilo Lemos from Zurich-based company Starmind, which also provides the digital platform where the Network is hosted. Starmind’s AI is used by leading companies in the pharmaceutical, financial, CPG, telecoms and professional services sectors to narrow the knowledge gap between their employees and help contributors find the top experts in the company to answer their questions.

The project kicked off earlier this year with the first step of defining what content the Knowledge Network should contain and who should be invited to join. The project team was adamant that the future members of the Knowledge Network should play an important role in shaping the Network – after all, it’s the members of a community who should define what the community looks like.

The team came up with a few different use cases and presented them to representatives of the ETH Alumni community during the Alumni Forum in June, where the attendees participated in a workshop to discuss the pros and cons of each use case presented. The findings of the forum helped the team to better shape the use cases.

The next step was to send out a survey to all ETH Alumni – members and non-members of the association alike – to validate and refine the findings of the project team and attendees of the ETH Alumni forum. The survey received over 1300 responses on the future content and structure of the Network, and also served to recruit the Knowledge Network Pioneers; a group of 200 early adopters who played a pivotal role in the successful launch of the project.

Pioneers

The Pioneers are volunteers who were recruited through the survey as described above and started their work in early November, after the project team had had the time to implement the findings of the survey and had built the Network accordingly. Their role was threefold:

1 – review the Ground Rules of Participation and ensure those rules reflected who the ETH Alumni community are as a group.

2 – test the Knowledge Network’s structure, navigation, ease-of-access, and first-time user experience.

3 – populate the Network with questions and answers so that the members would have content to interact with when they joined the Knowledge Network on 28 November.

The Pioneers did a remarkable job in all three activities and helped the project the team to confidently go back to the drawing board to put the final polishes on the Network in the two weeks leading up to its launch.

Present

The Knowledge Network has now been live for a few days and, at the time of the typing of this article, it includes 1300 members, 114 questions and 250 answers and comments. The topics of discussion vary from the technical (e.g “Drawing Box Diagram with Python”), to the professional (e.g “How to find projects as an IT consulting start-up / Freelancer?”) to everyday life (e.g “Looking for a good restaurant near Zurich main station”) and the number of members and interactions grows daily.

Don’t miss out! The ETH Alumni Knowledge Network is available for all members of the ETH Alumni Association. .

We’ll see you in the ETH Alumni Knowledge Network!