This document describes the technological infrastructure that may be useful for an open research project.
Candidate Products
A lot of these items are available in open source projects (either separately of as a package solution). The only one that is really research-specific is bibliography software (for which there are some open-source solutions).
Discussion Forum
This is an alternative (and complement) to a mailing list. It provides topics and posts to those topic with hierarchical discussion. Discussion forums seem to have replaced mailing lists (at least in high volume discussions).
phpBB is free and open source
Bibliography
I think you had a suggestion here Martin?
Wiki
Good for constructing a knowledge base (hierarchy of pages) as opposed to editing separate document (e.g. research papers or presentations in Google Docs).
MediaWiki is free and open source
Issue Tracking
Used for feature requests and bug tracking in software development
Mailing List
Good for announcements but having every post from every discussion go into everyone InBox can be overwhelming. Best to use a Discussion Forum for discussions.
Google Groups includes a mailing list.
Calendar
Shared calendar (and to do items)
Google Calendar?
Database
Good for, ah, storing data, if the need be. I thought Google had a public database infrastructure but I can't track it down. I know Yahoo Groups come with a simple (non-linked tables) database facility.
Solutions Options
- Complete Custom-Built Solution - Inappropriate to build software from scratch due to effort and time required.
- Custom-Integrated Solution - Repackage a number of open source solutions (e.g. including bibliography software)
- Generic Solution - Use a current open-source collaboration suite (perhaps with some retargeting, e.g. labelling)
A custom-integrated solution (2) would probably be best but it will be more work than using a generic solution. Need to consider the effort vs. functionality.
Open Systematic Review (OSR) Mini-Project
Comments