Colloquium at Stanford
The Unfinished Revolution


Memorandum

Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 21:10:21 -0700

From:   Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com
Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com

To:     unrev2, unrev-II@egroups.com

Subject:   Collaborative Systems Development Efforts
Other DKR Projects Creating OHS

These are efforts engaged in the production of software to assist the process of remote collaboration to define a problem, investigate alternatives, make decisions, and design a solution. The many entries here point to the fact that this an idea whose time has come -- the technology has matured to the point that solutions are feasible, while the need has never been greater.

The corrolary is that the development of a new industry is imminent -- either haphazardly as a result of individual efforts, or via common standards. (Perhaps this September's Collaborative Virtual Environments Conference have an impact on that:

http://www.ai.sri.com/cve2000/.)

If nothing else, one or more of these systems should be pressed into use to replace email as a discussion tool. [Many thanks to Paul Fernhout, who supplied the large number of entries that make up the second half of this list, as well as the other unrev-II contributors.]

My List

Bootstrap Project

A forming startup currently meeting at SRI.

Foresight Org

Intermediary backlink-managment system (Crit) for HTML pages. Currently investigating follow-on opportunities.

Ka-Ping Yee

Graduate student project on email-based system. (Ping was one of the primary developers of Crit.)

Traction

A collaborative journaling and thought-organizing tool.

http://twisted-systems.com/intro.html

Collabrador

Part of Berkeley's Wireless Reseach Center (BWRC). An open-source project for web-based collaboration and datasharing tools. [Jack Park]

http://www.gigascale.org/collabrador/

http://www.gigascale.org/collabrador/faq/

http://www.gigascale.org/pubs/16.html

Citigroup

Began an effort in this direction, realized it was outside their area of expertise, but have motivation, experience, and insights into the organizational impediments to adoption.

BeOpen

For-profit enterprise, but totally oriented to facilitation of open-source software. Very ineresting business plan. [Doug Englebart]

http://www.BeOpen.com

Collaborative Virtual Workspace

An office automation environment that enables people to converse, collaborate, and interact regardless of their geographic location. [John Deneen]

http://www.beopen.com/ossindex/entries/924349135.shtml

A NAME="01GQ"> http://cvw.mitre.org/cvw/info/ArchOverview.php3

LightSocket??

(Couldn't find an entry for this... [Bob Weiner]

Collab.net

Founded in the past five months, by Brian Behlendorf with O'Reilly and Associates. Apparently has very explicit and direct endorsement by hp. [Doug Englebart]

http://www.collab.net

Xerox Efforts

Three efforts underway in this space: [John Deneen]

Collaborative email/HTML (Berekely startup)

http://www.infocanvas.com/Recruiting/xFormOverveiw112199.html

Tango

This link gets redirected to a form that wants a lot of information before you can get anywhere.

http://trurl.npac.syr.edu/tango/

Something fairly interesting...

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/distview/userdocs.html

--somewhat interesting

Habanero

http://havefun.ncsa.uiuc.edu/habanero/

By the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA).

Freely downloadable from

http://havefun.ncsa.uiuc.edu/habanero/Release/index.html

--"The Habanero framework or API is designed to give developers the tools they need to create collaborative Java applications. The framework provides the necessary methods to create or transition existing applications and applets into collaborative applications."

--"...provides the necessary environment to create collaborative work environments and virtual communities. The environment includes a server that hosts sessions and a client that interacts with sessions..."

--From the tools page:

"Habanero applications or Hablets ... can be built from scratch or transitioned from existing Java applications and applets. We ... have created a reposotory for the tools with a dynamic installation tool."

--Existing tools include a whiteboard, a web browser, a voting tool, chat, audio chat, and something called mpEdit, in addition to their "clip-N-ship" bit that downloads and installs a tool.


Web-based, integrated-mail, meeting/proj mgt tool [John Deneen]

http://www.accentuate.com/whatsnew/intweek97-8-18.html


Paul Fernhout's List of Open Source Candidates

(The notes in this section are Paul's slightly condensed.)

A web application server with support for collaboration (newsgroups, chat, portal, weblog, document storage, etc.).

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/1213apps.html\

ArsDigita Community System

here now and works well (w/ TCL, AOLServer, Oracle) ArsDigita is a growing consulting company funded by itself.

http://www.arsdigita.com

Zope web application server

Here now and works well (w/Python) Has a great security model for multiple users developing in browsers. Zope's creator (DigiCool) is vaguely venture capital supported (I don't know how much) and will provide consulting services on Zope.

http://www.zope.org

Collaborative Virtual Workspace

Here now (w/Java and TK, MOO, location paradigm)

http://cvw.mitre.org/

Enhydra

Java/XML based web application server

http://www.enhydra.com/

Being buzzword compliant, these people just got a total of $15 million as investments.

Midgard

PHP based web application server (PHP's syntax is C/Perl-ish)

http://www.midgard-project.org/

Wikis

User editable web pages, and some remote screen collaboration.

Squeak

Almost here now i.e. bleeding edge (w/Smalltalk). This is the system I am at the moment strongly considering for my own work, with Zope as a second choice for content that needs to be up today.

http://www.squeak.org

Other Sources of Information

These are the organizers of the Collaborative Virtual Environments Conference (CVE2000):

Sincerely,



Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com