The User and Innovation programme funded Emerge to support the JISC in building, maintaining and sustaining a community of practice to help develop and promote a consistent approach to the development of the next generation learning, teaching, research and administration environments. A key component to the JISC Emerge approach was to encourage the adoption of a User Engagement (UE) process and enabling its use by the developers of the next generation of web-based (web 2.0) services.

The UE process is described in the CMS in three layers. First there is a contextual layer that consists of a paper providing a high level description of the UE process in terms of its rationale, general description of the UE framework, and its implementation. It ends by drawing some conclusions and recommendations. The contextual layer also provides an overview of the UE process showing the various layers, their components and relationships.

The second layer provides implementation details. This takes the form of a System Implementation (SI) Architecture that describes the UE process from the development rather than the change practice perspective. The various SI stages and a selection the methods and techniques within each stage are provided in a Guide. The third and final layer provides access to a range of Case Studies drawn from the experiences of the Emerge community from using the UE process in their own projects.

The layered approach has been designed to provide the CMS user with multiple access points with differing levels of detail and so hopefully will meet the needs of a wide and diverse audience.