As stated in the site's Terms of Service, members "seek to use the Academic Commons as a means of fulfilling our highest aspirations for integrating technology into our teaching, learning, and collaborating."

The need for a university-wide means of sharing knowledge was perceived by CUNY Committee on Academic Technology, and discussions began in early 2008 to find a solution.

While countering the "prospect of missed connections" was a principal reason why the CUNY Academic Commons was formed, serendipitous discovery became a technological goal.

Developers of the site (primarily faculty and graduate students) experimented with social media tools to see how best to connect scholars, while not being too intrusive in their daily lives.

In her critique in Yale University’s Collaborative Learning Center blog,[7] Kristjiana Gong (2010) finds several ways CUNY Academic Commons is able to build a "social university": Since funding did not permit a full-service site, a small team of software developers and community facilitators began to shape the Commons with a "self-service approach" in which faculty and graduate students were largely responsible for building their own sites.

The CUNY Academic Commons has expanded over time to incorporate more robust group and site functionality, becoming both a hub for sharing pedagogical resources and as a tool for teaching courses.

[14] Other teaching projects at CUNY that share the open-source ethos and do-it-yourself approach of the Commons include Manifold,Blogs@Baruch, Eportfolios@Macaulay, OpenLab at City Tech, and Looking for Whitman.

As Lamb & Groom (2011) write in Educause: "the jaw-dropping CUNY Academic Commons … seamlessly integrates the open-source … platforms into an appealing and highly sustainable environment."

"The CUNY Academic Commons: Social Network as Hatchery" was one of six winning practices recognized for a number of criteria, including "innovation and replicability" and the ability to advance “the goals of access, learning effectiveness, faculty and student satisfaction, and scalability.”[21] The tag line from the site's brochure - "What will you build?"