Online scientific collaboration: the sequel

In 2000 I was commissioned to write a report called Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration. That was before modern social media, before blogs even really got going. But arxiv.org was already well-established, and wikis and calendar services and Dave Winer’s proto-blog, Manila, and many kinds of discussion forums were relevant to my theme. On the standards front, RSS, MathML, and SVG were emerging. One of my premonitions, that lightweight and loosely-coupled web services would matter, turned out to be accurate. Another, the notion of a universal canvas for creating and editing words, pictures, data, and computation, remains part of the unevenly distributed future, though projects like IPython Notebook and Federated Wiki rekindle my hope that we’ll get there.

Now I’m writing an update to that report. There’s unfinished business to reconsider, but also much new activity. Scientific collaboration happens in social media and on blogs, obviously. It happens in…