People, not scientific instruments, are the most important part of any scientific project. If there were no people, there would be no project in the first place, or there would be no one to understand it. The same can be said of collaboration. The point of collaborating is to bring together several people to work collectively. Therefore, in order to have a successful distributed collaboration, the people and the communications between them must be of highest priority.
The key to these experiments is to help the scientists involved work together most effectively. They must be able to manipulate aspects of the experiment, locate information that they need, and work together using natural means of interaction. When working with a complex laboratory machine, one wants dials and buttons, gauges and readouts. When working with other people, one wants to turn to them and say something, or to walk into a meeting room with a set of documents and pass them around. One wants to sit around while the experiment runs, monitoring progress while exchanging idle yet informative chatter. Casual and natural activities like these are essential in making distributed collaboration an effective reality.
Jane sat back and looked around the table at her colleagues.
``Well,'' she said, ``the experiment's been running for an hour and it looks good so far.''
The others nodded, some looking at their interfaces to the equipment, monitoring the status.
``I think I'm going to call it a night. If something comes up, page me.... So, Brian, how's the weather out there?''
Brian grinned, ``You know how the Bay area is...''
``Ah,'' Jane , ``I do. Glad I'm in Chicago this weekend.''
``I'm going to take a video of this session'', she continued, ``if none of you has any objection. Perhaps I can find something we didn't see.''
She stood up from the table and strolled to her office in the electronic lab, where she dropped the video tape. She then disconnected from the elab and looked around her office. ``Back to reality,'' she sighed.