3.4 COLLABORATIONS
Collaboration is defined as an act or process of working together on a project or some
intellectual activity.
But what is the importance of collaboration? The world is increasingly becoming
globalised on issues like environment protection, control of terrorism, international
business, learning etc. In such changing circumstances, even the scientific
explorations have become collaborative. Thus, in this global world, role of the Internet
tools is to enable collaboration among people. From this perspective chat, news
groups, wikis all are some basic tools for collaboration. Collaboration involves both
communication and sharing of ideas. Modern day science, to certain extent, has
become collaborative. Today, you may find a number of research papers coauthored
by many people staying at geographically diverse places.
Each collaborative project has several social, political, ethical and technical issues that
are to be addresses at the start of the project itself.
Some of the key questions a distributed collaborative project needs to address are:
Will cumulative wisdom emerge from the collaborative efforts? After all a
collaborative project also requires good investment. Several research papsers have
been written about the broad set of success measures and factors that are responsible
for successful collaboration. You may refer to further readings given at the end of this
Unit for more details.
Some of the areas where collaboration has been found to be successful is the area of
physical science that requires huge investment in expensive devices. However, if the
already existing labs can do a distributed collaborative attempt then the overall cost of
a project may be reduced. One such area may be the high-energy physics. Another
important area in this direction may be Health Sciences. Some of the complex data
intensive problems including genetics, neurology, biomedicine etc. may require
international participation. The third important area for collaboration is the
Environmental Studies, this also require wide spread data collection and involvement
of large communities. Some of the topics of concern may be the ecology. The latest discovery of new species of plants and animals are result of collaborative efforts. The Applications II
earthquake data and global tsunami warning system may be based on worldwide
collaboration.
As stated earlier, most of the tools used on the Internet can be used for some form of
collaboration. However, we would like to show an example of collaborative tool for
student. Google Docs is one such tool that may enable you to create a collaborative
project report online. You may create a document using it and share it with your
colleagues who in turn may be able to add content to it from anywhere, edit it and
discuss about it using a discussion group. For example, you want are writing a
research paper with few other writers. You may create a draft report that may be
edited by other writers online. Please note that in such a case all of you are working
on the same document. Please note that this document may be a spreadsheet or
presentation or just text document.
Another software that can be used for collaboration is Google Wave. It allows you a
shared web space for discussion or working together in a group. You may use text,
photographs, maps etc for this purpose. This software also combines collaboration
with email, chat, messaging etc. The following figure shows a sample screen of
Google wave:
There are plenty of other web-based collaboration tools. Here are a few of them:
As discussed earlier, Media Wiki is the software in which Wikipedia and IOCG wiki
of IGNOU have been developed. It is a very simple tool that allows multiple people to
make and commit changes in a document. It keeps the version of each change. Many
Universities have used this software to develop a collaboration space.
Zoho
Zoho is a division of ZOHO Corporation, a US-based Software Company. Zoho is a
very good site for collaboration. It not only allows simple mundane tasks like group
editing, document sharing, group chat, etc but also provides some management tasks
like milestone tracking, invoice creation, and other team tasks. The figure 3.13 shows
the screen on Zoho. For more details on Zoho, you may visit the website:
Volunteer Computing:
A somewhat similar concept to collaboration is the concept of volunteer computing
where you allow your hardware resources to be used for the purpose of some online
project. One such project that is hosted by Space Science Laboratory at the University
of California, Berkley is for Search of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence called
SETI@Home. This project employs a software platform called BOINC that you need
to download in case you wish to part of the project. Once, you become part of the
project then your computer executes some of the data that is constantly being received
from sensors. This project has paved the way for volunteer computing but has not
located any Extra Terrestrial so far. You can obtain more details on this project from
the website http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/. Researches in Taiwan are making an
attempt to use volunteer computing to visualize earthquakes.
