Collaboration Tools

Synchronous Tools

• Teleconferences: Despite all the technology that surrounds us, the telephone remains the easiest to use, and often the most effective tool available for remote collaboration.  If you do this a lot, dedicated teleconference lines available for use 24x7 can be very handy and are not expensive.
• Desktop- or Web- Sharing: We use the MeetingPlace T.120 service, when we need to share documents or applications in real time. This service is provided at no charge by DOE's Energy Sciences Network Collaboration Services to any Office of Science sponsored project. There are a number of tools in this space. An advantage of MeetingPlace is that it requires only a web browser with a Java JVM plugin and does not require any ports to be opened through firewalls. A  disadvantage is that only Windows clients can originate content, though Mac and Linux clients can view it.  Desktop sharing tools that allow remote control of a participant's machine can be troublesome in environments where security concerns are higher.
  
• Instant messaging: We use Jabber (CCA people are often found in the cca@conference.jabber.org chat room).  One of the biggest challenges with IM is the fact that there are so many different IM networks that (for the most part) don't talk to each other.  Clients that can speak many IM protocols can be helpful, but it is best if everyone is on the same network.  We consider "group chat" to be a critical feature, and that's something that Jabber provides that not all other protocols do.  We've run our own Jabber server in the past, and may do so again, but there are plenty of other servers that provide free public access.

Asynchronous Tools

• Web sites and wikis: We use TikiWiki and Plone. Powerful tools for both intra-project communication and reaching out to the interested public.  We've found that plain old HTML web sites, managed through a version control system were hard for people to contribute to.  Wikis and modern content management systems seem to lower the barrier. 
  
• Mailng lists: We use Mailman. Individual email and mailing lists remain one of the primary tools available for asynchronous interactions, although spam and general email overload have already resulted in significantly reduced responsiveness to email. We use lots of different mailing lists to reach different, focused groups.  Centrally archived mailing lists can provide a useful record of discussions.  Consider whether you want them to be public or private.  Private archives usually require a password to access, which can be tedious.  Public archives are likely to be indexed by search engines, which may be good or bad for you. Also consider whether you want the mere existence of the list to be public information.  If it is, you may have completely unknown people stumble on to it and sign up. If the email address for the list is ever made public, you will get spam, so be prepared.  With some good tools, it can be dealt with without too much trouble.
• Scheduling tools: Our experience is that electronic calendars are individual or institutional, and exchanging information between them outside of the home institution is hard or impossible.  We do not attempt to maintain any kind of distributed calendar for the project.  However we do use some tools to help schedule meetings and telecons.  MeetingWizard  and Doodle both simplify the task determining when everyone can meet.  MeetingWizard takes a more individual approach -- you provide email addresses for everyone you want to schedule and they get an email with a personalized URL to respond at. Doodle takes a more open approach.  You setup your "poll" for meeting times, and send the URL to everyone you want to participate.  Anyone who knows that URL can respond to the poll.
• Electronic document repository: There are a wide range of tools in this space.  We primarily want a place that we can post (or link to) technical papers and publications related to the CCA.  We use EPrints.
  

Software Development Tools

• Source code version control repositories: We use CVS and Subversion to manage software, documents, web sites, and more.
  
• Issue Trackers: We use Roundup issue trackers to handle bug reports and track development needs for much of our software.
  
• Shell access: Sometimes you simply need two developers to be able to login to the same machine and work through a problem together.  As security keeps gettting racheted up, it becomes harder and harder to find such common platforms.
  

Face to Face Meetings

Despite all of these tools, sometimes things are just easier to do in person.

• The CCA Forum's quarterly face-to-face meetings generally include TASCS business as needed.
• Coding camps:   These are working meetings, focused on specific coding tasks or objectives.  They are most often a form of outreach to help CCA users make rapid progress on a goal, but are also used for internal tasks.  The basic idea is to get a group of users together with experience CCA developers in one place for a 3-5 day period.  The users have specific goals, and having the CCA developers on hand allows questions or obstacles to be dealt with much more expiditiously than if they had to track down the expert remotely and interact with them by email, or even telephone. They are especially productive when the participating users are geographically distributed, and may not have local access to a CCA expert.  We generally hold them "on demand".

The cca-forum.org Collaboration Server

TASCS operates the cca-forum.org collaboration server, which provides many of the electronic collaboration services mentioned above, for the benefit of the CCA community.

If you're involved in the the CCA as a developer or user, you can request an account to access these services.