[thelist] Online collaborative working system

[Richard Harb]

-----Original Message-----
From: john at johnallsopp.co.uk
Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2005, 11:12:51 AM
> Hi

> I want to discuss a project with a couple of friends online. I've
> started with a mind-map
> <http://www.mind-map.com/EN/mindmaps/definition.html> of the issues to
> discuss. The project is currently very unstructured, with various
> ideas requiring further exploration.

> My question is, does anyone have experience of online tools to help
> with this sort of thing?

> I could start an email list, that's fine but not many people's email
> clients support threading.

> I could start a wiki. No idea whether that's simple or not.

I did just that for a project I did with some friends.

It's been a while, but back then I set up phpWiki. It was fairly simple to set
up, took maybe 20 minutes (download, reading the docs, modifying the config). It
didn't have any bells or whistles, but did the job just fine.

http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:compare features an interesting overview ...

I can recommend going the wiki way. Depending on the server you have you can use
perl/php/python? wikis.



> I could install a forum just for this, with all the aspects of the
> project in different sections. That might work, I've never installed
> one though.

I think a wiki is a better solution as it allows anybody to edit any post /
text. It's also better suited to structure information.


> Or I could just keep meeting them in the real world and just do it
> manually.

I guess meeting people in thereal world has to be part of the process anyway.
Though you could just print the information and use it as a basis of your
discussion.

HTH
Richard