On the State of Scientific Telecollaboration?

Douglas Arnold asks: "This summer I will take over as director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis, one of the world's premier institutes in the mathematical sciences. (This year's program on mathematics in multimedia should interest many Slashdot readers) The IMA hosts visits by over a thousand scientists a year, mostly using Linux to meet their computing needs. I am interested in pursuing telecollaboration and teleconferencing at the institute, so a scientist there can work with a scientist off-site, carrying on a mathematical discussion as if they were at the same blackboard. What sort of hardware and software exists for this sort of application? Is there anything that works well under Linux? I am thinking of things like shared whiteboards, 'collaboratories,' networked graphics tablets (on which it is comfortable to enter formulas and do calculations), integration with audio or video conferencing systems, and so forth."

Comments

Listen to the customer

[maggard]

Electric-chalkboards are a dime a dozen - talk to your purchasing person.

Frankly I'd not approach it from "I like Linux how can we use it" direction but rather from "What are my researchers comfortable with and how can I support that?" As you noted this is about collaboration; you're going to need to interoperate with a large number of systems not under your control.

With that in mind your goal is likely to be platform independence, not Linux-specific solutions. Standard protocols, not specific "solutions".

As part of that you'll presumably want a system that supports both pen-based graphics (the classic "scribbled on a napkin") as well as more structured mathematical layout (as used by TeX, MathML or Mathematica.) Really you'll need whatever folks express themselves most easily in. For voice the telephone is universal & standardized, video has a number of reasonable standards with some degree of interoperability.

Personally I'd invest in a good computing infrastructure, encourage the researchers to network with their peers & discover solutions that suit them, or failing that undertake to write/sponsor an open tool that would facilitate the collaboration you're looking for.

Whatever the case I'd wait until I was in place, see what's being used now, how effective it is and what directions present themselves. Your user base is likely to have some strong opinions and presumably has some experience with what works for them and what doesn't.

(f it were up to me I'd look into some sort of Wiki system that supports mathematical notation - hit a search engines for details, here's one hit: http://allmyfaqs.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Math_symbols. That & again, good telephones.)