[Math] Tools for long-distance collaboration

math-communicationsoft-question

Background

In general, I am aware of four and a half methods of long-distance collaboration:

  1. Telephone (including voice-chat, VOIP, etc.; anything that is voice based)
  2. Text chat (chat room, IM, gchat, things like that)
  3. E-mail (or other asynchronous messaging system)
  4. Online whiteboards, real-time collaborative text editors, desktop-sharing (or other software, graphical system)
  5. (The half) Adding a webcam to any of the above and call it Video-blah.

What this question is not about

I am not asking about tools for collaborative paper-writing which has already been addressed here last year. So in particular, to limit the scope, this question is not about the part in a collaboration when all the ideas are set-out, all the heuristics checked, and all that's left is to flesh out the argument and write it up.

I am also not asking for just a list of services. I am fairly confident my Google-fu is at least as good as yours.

What this question is about

I am interested in tools that help collaboration in the earlier stage when we are still brainstorming, setting the scope of the project; or the stage where we are troubleshooting to fix a flawed argument. In other words, I am interested in the scenarios where the ideal thing to do would be for a face-to-face chat while writing on a black board or a piece of paper, but when it is difficult to do so (both of you have to teach, and you are on different continents).

In other words, I am asking about situations where real-time, instantaneous interactions are preferred (and so option 3, e-mail, should be reserved as a last resort). In this sense, voice interaction is preferred: it is a lot easier to interrupt the other party when talking then when typing, and be able to force a change of direction in the conversation. On the other hand, e-mail and a lot of the chat software has the advantage that your discussions are automatically documented and saved for future review. The main downside to a pure voice communication, however, is that (for me at least) mathematics is visual. It helps a lot when there is a black board or a piece of paper with equations on it on which I can focus my attention. So I'm especially interested in ways that I can share mathematics visually (rendered LaTeX, diagrams, things like that).

The Question

There are two questions:

  • Personal testimonials: of the above solutions, which, and in what combinations, have you used and feel strongly about. I would especially appreciate it if you can say a few words about the strengths and potential weaknesses of the setup.
  • Thinking outside the box: are there other solutions that I have overlooked in my list above?

Best Answer

I'm a little late to the party, and a lot of my favorite tools have been mentioned, but since Willie Wong asked for testimonials...

  • Meta: don't expect it to be 'just as easy'! If you suggest to use some of these tools, make sure your collaborator understands that this requires effort (at least initially) and a different routine.
  • audio/video: video calls are cheap and easy to use -- perfect for all those hand-waving arguments. I mostly use skype (I tried tokbox for multi-user conferencing but never used it frequently). Also, as mentioned by Beth, skype is good enough to broadcast a (small) blackboard. If you have real camcorder, you can broadcast using vlc, justin.tv or ustream for higher resolution video (this comes with lag, so keep some other audio solution). Also great to hook people up to seminars btw.
  • Online whiteboards with tablets! The combination of online whiteboards and tablets is my favorite since it can be set up almost anywhere. I personally use scriblink and dabbleboard extensively; scriblink is more reliable and uses less bandwidth, but dabbleboard has fancier technology (shape recognition, upload documents as background). For more privacy, there's also jarnal which can connect across the net, but I could never get it to work through firewalls. There are also all-in-one tools like dimdim -- but they were always too general for my purpose (and had problems with flash under linux). As already mentioned by Michael, whiteboards only make sense with a tablet of some sorts (I was happy with a wacom bamboo (cheap), but a tabletpc is even better (I have an HP TM2 running ubuntu)) Of course, you can type text on online whiteboards (scriblink even does a little TeX), but there are better tools for plain text.
  • Remote Desktops Sometimes I also like to connect the desktops, i.e., allowing one side to fully access the other side's desktop. I usually do this via teamviewer (connects through firewalls), but vnc, rdp are good, too. The advantage: all your programs are there! Anything you can do on your computer, you can do together. E.g., Xournal, OneNote for tablet-scribbling, gummi or latexian for live-previewed LaTeX, pdf-viewers for collaborative document browsing etc.
  • LaTeX (in the cloud) If you just want to scribble some TeX, there are many wikis with $\LaTeX$ support. I use Tiddlywiki with the mathsvg-plugin a lot these days -- a single html/javascript file, portable, fast TeX. Combined with a cloud service like dropbox or box.net and you can keep everything up-to-date in real time.
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