Facilitating Collaborations
tooling and processes
OGSA-DAI Experience
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Background
• OGSA-DAI started as a distributed project
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IBM Hursley
Oracle
Edinburgh
Newcastle
Manchester
…
• Set infrastructure to establish collaborative
environment
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Incremental build up
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
The essentials
• Code Repository
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We used CVS
• Closed but now opening up
• http://cvs.ogsadai.org.uk
• Web site
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Hard to do well
Link to the outside world
• http://www.ogsadai.org.uk
• Branding
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What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet; …
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Essentials II
• Communications
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Face-to-face meetings
• Folks got to put names to faces
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Access Grid (AG) meetings
• Worked when AG worked …
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Telcons
• Mainly for management … or when AG did not work …
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Mailing lists
• Internal – between members
• External – communicate with a user base
• Archives (searchable)  Important!!
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Things that worked well
• IRC (Internet Relay Chat) – chat room
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Have our own (closed) server
Really helped to build team espirit de corps
Forum for technical discussions
Keeping server logs really useful
• Messaging (MSN/Skype/AIM/GoogleTalk/…)
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Mostly point to point
• Meeting Scheduler
Doodl, Meet-o-matic
• Wiki (we used twiki)
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Mainly acted as a document repository
Organic growth
Hard to find things
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Things that did not work so well
• Bugzilla
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Started off as a bug tracker
Became all things to all men
Lost effectiveness and got deprecated
Do support through the user mailing list
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Things we are playing with now
• TRAC
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Issue tracking/wiki/
• Blog
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Effective way of disseminating to community
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Other things we’ve not tried …
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Forums
Guestbooks
Documentation annotators
Surveys
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk