I am very excited about SciSpace. I am excited that web technologies could revolutionise how scientists collaborate, and thus could qualitatively change the concept of collaboration.
Until recently, the main communication tools have been email, telephone and actual meetings. eMail used to work well, and was good for sharing documents, images and information. Until we started to get 100s of emails a day! Now I use instant messaging for some of this communication, and video conferencing to enable virtual meetings to happen more often. Along came wikis, and we then had a means of posting information in a way that gave us control. Except that like the 100s of emails, after joining 5 wikis I could no longer cope. There are ways to manage distributed information using RSS, for example, but what should have been a simple way to manage information exchange becomes less simple.
I am excited about SciSpace because I think that the adaptation of social network tools has the potential to significantly enhance our collaborations. These sort of sites make posting information, enagaging in discussion, and posting documents & images easy. If SciSpace can host all of my collaborative environments, I have a single place to go to, and I can use the SciSpace tools to enable me to quickly see what is new.
This is all new; it is essentially a journey during which, I am quite sure, we will learn a lot that we are not expecting.
martin, 16-May-2007 21:18 (GMT)