Supporting Loose Confederacies of Collaboration: Experiences from Computational Biology and 3D Imaging Collaboratories

摘要

The Biomedical Collaboratories for Software Development project examines how currently available and emerging collaborative computing technologies can improve the quality of biomedical science and decrease the time to discovery by developing, supporting, and evaluating collaboratory testbeds in the computationally-intense fields of structural biology and 3D image construction and navigation. These scientists cum software-developers can be characterized as a “loosely confederated” community of researchers, only some of whose responsibilities are directly related to the collaboratory's objectives. The demands of collaboration support in this setting are described and contrasted with those of traditional distributed software development teams and instrument-centric collaboratories.