Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Scientific collaborations are established for a wide variety of tasks for which several communication modes are necessary, including messaging, file-sharing, and collaborative editing. In this position paper, we describe our work on the Pervasive Collaborative Computing Environment (PCCE) which aims to facilitate scientific collaboration within widely distributed environments. The PCCE provides a persistent space in which collaborators can locate each other, exchange messages synchronously and asynchronously and archive conversations. Our current interest is in exploring research and development of shared editing systems with the goal of integrating this technology into the PCCE. We hope to inspire discussion of technology solutions for an integrated approach to synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaborative editing.