PUBLIC MARKS with search collaboration

The following is a highlight of a competitive analysis I did earlier this year when I was involved in designing software that would allow remote research teams to work together. While software is still a long way from replacing all in-person collaboration it's becoming easier for remote or mobile workers to stay productive and communicative with their team. Certainly the tools we have available today are a vast improvement over what I used when I first tried telecommuting 12 years ago!

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) was formed in June 2002 with a mission to "facilitate the international coordination and collaboration necessary for the development and deployment of the tools, systems and organizational structures necessary to enable the international utilization of astronomical archives as an integrated and interoperating virtual observatory." The IVOA now comprises 17 VO projects from Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Membership is open to other national and international projects according to the IVOA Guidelines for Participation.

R is a high-level programming language used primarily for statistical computing and graphics. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google.

0047 is an organization for projects in and in between the fields of art and architecture. Founded in Berlin in 2004, 0047 was originally an exhibition space for Norwegian art and architecture but it soon became an internationally based project involving artist, architects and curators from all over the world. Since the opening over 130 artists, architects and curators have been involved in over 30 exhibitions and projects, both in our own space or in collaboration with other institutions. Over 60 people from all over the world has attended our studio program.

NEBULA is a Cloud Computing environment developed at NASA Ames Research Center, integrating a set of open-source components into a seamless, self-service platform. It provides high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and uses a virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies.

The fully-integrated nature of the NEBULA components provides for extremely rapid development of policy-compliant and secure web applications, fosters and encourages code reuse, and improves the coherence and cohesiveness of NASA's collaborative web applications. It is used for Education and Public Outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support.

Built from the ground up around principles of transparency and public collaboration, NEBULA is also an open-source project. NEBULA is built on the NEBULA platform.