In my current project at Sun, I’m program manager/project leader for a team that is spread over several locations. Up till now we’ve managed with phone calls and email and wikis and occasional physical meetings, but with travel budgets being cut, I’d like to explore other ways of collaborating that give more of the “group clustered around a whiteboard” feel when we need it. It is often the case that group discussions lead to better designs and better ideas than individuals alone tend to come up with; how do we make those group discussions work better when we can’t all attend one physical meeting? What tools, or books, or best practices exist that I haven’t heard of yet? Wikis have many uses in multi-location software development, but they don’t give that spark that I’m looking for. What does?
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IRC has its virtues, and it’s very easy to run a private IRC daemon on an intranet. I’ve heard good things about InspIRCd and UnrealIRCd in this application. Maybe Sun already has an ircd somewhere — ask around.
Here at Collaboration R Us, we sometimes use a Google Doc (on the inside network) as a whiteboard, though there is a lot of irritating pressing of Save and reloading the page when the default autosave and refresh are too slow, as they generally are. I’ve even used this outside Google to help with a phone call.
yeah, irc.
More of a working in an office together feel than whiteboard/brainstorming but, i guess, it’s all in how you use it.
Long time back we used what’s effectively a ‘shared’ notebook on screen. This to capture and build on ideas presented? Backed by IRC or telcon/ for more general chat, that could work Lauren.
That app was Windows based, unsure if Linux / Sun have something similar.
HTH
DaveP
I tend to question the premise that there should be some sort of cyber-meet that replaces F2F.
I’ve done a lot of teleconferences and essayed irc and its brethren. I’ve experienced crude video conferences and a bit of virtual reality, but on the whole there’s just nothing like being *together* with all the accompanying touches/smells/off-mic/camera interactions.
The bit rate of sensual connections is still several orders of magnitude greater than the best available (or even proposed?) technological systems.
Until teleportation is widely available, there is simply no substitute, even conceptually, for *being there*. I suppose the ultimate metaphor is “phone sex” — does anyone seriously think it qualifies as an alt-attribute for the real thing?
I still clearly remember when I was in the “Chet Baker Room” in Amsterdam and Dave Pawson knocked on my door and said “hi”. And being in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing questioning Tim after his address. And…
Let’s look for ways to get together and just skip simulating real experience.
Love.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/21/1626208&from=rss
adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It’s especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously. EtherPad’s main differences from SubEthaEdit: it’s a Web application that de facto supports many platforms without the need for a central Mac OS X host; and it’s free. Here is a comparison of EtherPad and SubEthaEdit.
Another candidate for your team Lauren?
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