Collaboration tools at Newcastle

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Collaboration tools at Newcastle

• Caleb Racey
• Caleb.Racey_at_ncl.ac.uk

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Collaboration past/present practices

• Email As
• Communication platform
• Distributed File system
• Versioning repository
• Calendaring suite (without a calendar)
• Task manager
• Backup/archive system
• Maybe a website
• failed CMS experiment
• failed forum experiment

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Past/present problems

• Email is source of all evil
• Massively over utilized
• Co-opted (corrupted) to many causes
• The 100meg file problem
• The file type problem I want my .exe
• No identity assurance
• Spam
• Phishing
• More spam
• False positives
• Websites Hard to write
• Out of date
• Abandoned
• One way communication

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Past/present Positives

• Email gets job done
• Very low barrier to participation
• setup get address
• Usability is good
• Websites
• Visible
• Searchable
• Durable
• Enormous demand for collaborative tools
• Low expectation easy to exceed

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What we use/want

• What we presently use
• Blogs
• Mailing lists
• Wikis
• What we want
• Calendaring (CalDAV??)
• WebDAV community file spaces
• Mod_dav_svn?
• Suites Sakai, Mindquarry?
• IM??

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Group Blogs
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Sympa mailings list
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Mediawiki
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Does it work?

• Benefits
• Simple User interface
• Good technology
• versioning, recent changes, notification
• Trendy
• Understandable Federatability
• Easy joining process
• Problems
• Interface not simple enough
• Group info locked away
• Yet more email

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What we need

• Approach
• Generic platform
• Loosely coupled collaborative tools
• Allow behaviour to emerge
• Group management
• Reusable across platform
• Scalable (not .htaccess)
• Federation aware
• Group Management User interface
• Self service
• By invite
• By manager with delegation

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What we are doing

• Looking at Grouper to admin collaborative suite
• Gfivo project
• Grouper to support Federated Identity for
  Virtual Organizations
• JISC funded 2 years
• National demonstrator
• Outputs free to HE FE
• http//gfivo.ncl.ac.uk

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Questions

• Can we wean people off email?
• Are they aware of their own problems?
• Do they care about real identity?
• Is loose coupling something users get?
• Do people only care about access control when it
  bites them?
• Good Collaboration is emergent from behavior
• do the tools really matter?
• Is it just attitude that counts?