Facilitating Collaborations – tooling and processes

Attendees

Mario Antonioletti (facilitator), Simon Hettrick (scribe), Tobias Schiebeck, Neil Chue Hong, Steve Lee, Tim Parkinson, David Wallom, Steve Wilson, Clare Sloggett, Damian Brasher, Louise Price, Matthew Habgood, Weijian Fang, Andrew Price, Simon Mueller, Gillian Sinclair, Gabor Terstyansky, Pascal Ekin, Aaron Turner

Overview

The purpose of this session was to find what software people used to build collaborations (e.g. videoconferencing software).The session started with three short presentations. The first described PAG, OMII-UK's videoconferencing tool, the second discussed collaborations at the OGSA-DAI project and the final presentation discussed collaborations at the DIASER project. Following the presentations, the group discussed software that they used to aid collaborations.

The general discussion concluded after the first session. A more-focussed topic, based on Customer Relationship Management systems, was continued in the following session.

Conclusions

What do people use?

The following list covers the collaborative tools that people in the session use - it is not a recommendation of the best tools to use. However, it was decided that the tools on the list should be investigated, so that recommendations could be made.

List of tools used:

• Glance
• Team viewer
• CCC Confirm
• Google docs
• Oovoo
• IOCOM
• iChair
• Evo
• Sakai
• PHP website
• BSCW
• Plone
• Second life
• Twitter
• Facebook

OGSA-DAI

The OGSA-DAI project maintains communication over their widely distributed group using teleconferencing, IRC, messaging, meeting schedulers, wiki, TRAC (issue tracking) and a blog for dissemination. They started to use Access Grid, but found it unreliable.

DIASER

The Diaser project website has recently begun to collaborate with other groups, including OMII-UK, and has found mailing lists, SVN and RSS to be useful. DIASER uses Skype and teleconferencing for meetings.

Further work

The list of tools that people use will be investigated so that recommendations can be made regarding the tools' usefulness.