Leader of the Comprehensive Collaborative Framework (CHEF) project, which developed an open source framework and tools for course management systems, workgroup support, and support of online research, Hardin has served as Director of the Collaborative Technologies Laboratory in the Duderstadt Center, and as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The CHEF project received support from NSF, NIH, and the University of Michigan.
Hardin has also served as Chairman of the Board for the Sakai Project, where the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) joined forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a modular, pre-integrated collection of open source tools. He managed development of online collaboration systems for many years, including when he joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign as Associate Director of Software Development, from the early to the late 1990s.
Hardin is also a founder and board member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (see http://www2004.org) and has taught a graduate course on the Semantic Web.
