No-one will have noticed this (if SciSpace.net security worked okay), but I wrote two grant proposals last week using SciSpace.net in collaboration with two sets of people based in different parts of the country.

I have done this before often. Typically we used email and Microsoft Word. This approach works okay until you get to the last few days. Then everyone starts to send you their edits, and then you are managing the task of merging several documents. And all this at a time of maximum stress. It is a nightmare, and things always get lost. I have done this before often enough to have experience of suddenly discovering you are editing an old version.

So Hello to SciSpace.net, and the use of the wiki and blog tools. We set up the main case to edit in the wiki, and people took turns to edit in their stuff. Comments were added either in the blog tool or in other wiki pages.

And no-one knew this was happening, because we used access control, which is exactly what we want.

In time I think that we will see better collaborative document tools, but for now the SciSpace tools worked well.

Then we reached the point where we had to copy to a Word document, and at that point we shifted from SciSpace.net to the traditional way of handing around a Word document via email. And it just reminded me how bad email is as a collaborative tool, because the nightmare of multiple copies came back!

Things I learned from this process:

1. The text edit window isn't really big enough for editing a document, but for now there isn't much we can do about it (this is an issue for Elgg);
2. You have the danger of competing edits; we are discussing this with the creator of the Folio wiki tool (and he is very receptive to ideas, which is great);
3. The Elgg text edit box is interesting in that it will pick up pasted in styles, which is not what you really want – I resorted to editing in html on occasions;
4. In fact I kept open a general text edit for my main text, and pasted in the whole text rather than editing in place.

At a recent workshop, I found myself using the title of this blog in both of the talks I gave, and, as happens, I found myself feeling quite passionate about the point!

But let me start with a bit of personal history. When I started in science, the primary tool for collaboration at a distance (apart from public transport) was the postal mail service (telephone was not allowed for PhD students or post docs in some of the institutes I worked in). One could send papers to people who you thought should know about your work, or send data and draft documents to collaborators. The big breakthrough for collaboration was the introduction of the Fax machine, because you could send graphs to your distant collaborators quickly and easily. eMail was a revolution, but actually the revolution was rather more recent than we imagine because it required your collaborators to also have access to email (and uptake was not uniformly quick), and interface development was quite late in coming.

For a while, email transformed collaboration. One could send ideas and engage with collaborators, and attachments allowed us to send data, figures and documents. For a few years it played a significant role in supporting collaborations. But then it all started to go wrong!

Why it went wrong is very simple: it was killed by its own success. The ability to spray out instant communications meant that is exactly what people did, until we started to drown in emails. I stress this is nothing to do with junk or spam email; my email client (Apple's email application) has an excellent junk/spam filter. It is just that we get too much email to be able to cope with, and now collaboration messages are lost in the noise of business emails, many of which are urgent.

In short, email is a communication tool that has served as a tool for collaboration, but its value as a collaboration tool is now much diminished. The longer version of this point is as follows.

1. With a huge number of emails in my inbox, it is now easy to lose track of emails and thus not deal with them. They quickly disappear down the inbox. Some might say that more organisation would help, but to be honest, I don't want to organise my emails; it just wouldn't work! I actually like to use the search tool provided by my email client to locate messages.
2. Collaborators don't always help with organisation of emails. eMails sent with poor titles, or worse, no titles, do not make browsing easy. For example, I might ping someone with an email with the title "Hello" (admittedly not very good for long-term management, but on the other hand, ping emails are not really supposed to be archived), and they might then use this as a starting point for a more serious discussion, each titled "Re. Hello". Poor use of titles is the equivalent of the metadata problem.
3. On a point of principle, I do not want to mix collaboration (which is enjoyable) with business (which often is not). I groan when I launch email and see all the demands coming in. This is not the environment I want to use for collaboration!
4. eMail is really designed for one person sending a message to someone else, and not really for one-to-many. Sure, it has the CC field, but often I have seen this not used properly (e.g. one person gets left off by mistake). Moreover, unless I include myself in the CC field (and thereby duplicate my sent-mail box into my inbox) I don't have a complete record in one place of the various stages of communication.
5. Whilst I can organise my view of any collaborative exchange of emails, I cannot affect how my collaborators view their version of the exchange.
6. And a new collaborator is not privy to what has already been exchanged, unless we send them an archive, but such archives are not designed to be read as such.
   
7. Once I have sent an email, it is out of my control. If I want to edit the content after reflection, or add to the content, I can't. If I have been ambiguous or unclear, I am at the mercy of the person reading the email (and email is notoriously easy to misread).

eMail is not all bad. It is actually excellent at providing a central point for my communications, and can be alerted by incoming messages.

eMail is okay as a tool for collaboration, but only "just okay". It is not good, merely okay. 

Now we have the potential for something better. This blog entry is not supposed to be an advert for SciSpace.net, but the sort of infrastructure we are trying to develop here (and which perhaps other people could develop) has the potential, I believe, to transform how we collaborate.

SciSpace has been a journey. It started at a workshop held at the National Instutute for Environmental eScience at the end of January 2007 on the topic of organic pollutants, organised by Kat Austen (see here for the link to the event web page). The idea was to link simulation scientists with experimentalist and field scientists. In breakout groups it was clear that everyone was saying, even though they didn't know it, that what the community needs is a MySpace for scientists. Hence SciSpace, which has developed from discussions that began at the event and were developed further in Cambridge between members of the NIEeS and the eMinerals and MaterialsGrid projects.

We tried a number of approaches, including a start-from-scratch approach and this approach using the Elgg software. Shortly after we noted the creation of Nature Network, which is aiming to be a social networking site for scientists. We experimented with Nature Network for a while, but concluded that in the short term at the least it is not developing in the way that will be useful to scientists. If anyone is interested, I was encouraged by the Nature Network team to deposit my comments, which you can read from this forum link.

Thus we decided that there is a market space for SciSpace, and we have now brought it to this state. As I write, we have not finished development work from our end, but it is now good enough to go live with.