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: http://www.adass.org/adass/proceedings/adass03/P3-14/
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Several Virtual Observatory projects use this type of web site to share info among project members and across projects. This is an experience report on the usage and maintenance of TWiki sites in Astronomy.
Even if at first it seems almost the opposite of how the Web and on-line communications "normally" work, it is intuitive and aspires to the Zen ideals known as Wabi-Sabi: "It finds beauty in the imperfect and ephemeral and constantly evolving".
Working in a distributed team always means spending a lot of time trying to keep everybody up-to-date about what other members are doing, as well to keep people in touch with each other. The infrastructure aims at facilitating project communication, therefore helping to share knowledge, the status and vision of the project, to draft ideas, and to synchronize different teams.
The TWiki is a web-based collaboration tool that offers the possibility to use a web site like an enhanced white-board. TWiki was not invented by the Astronomy Community but it perfectly suites our needs.
The astronomy-related TWiki sites considered in this paper have all seen a
constant increment both in the number of visitors and users, as well as
in the amount of pages created/updated and files uploaded.
These TWiki sites are ALMA, Astrogrid, Aus-VO, AVO, EGSO,
IVOA (Table. 1).
A TWiki Web is a collection of pages grouped by some logical
meaning.
A Topic means a wiki page with all its content.
Usage statistics are plotted in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2: The former describes the number of pages modified and the number of files uploaded, i.e. real interactions with the Twiki. The latter displays the number of pages visited in each month. To create these charts, only relevant Webs of each TWiki site were taken into account.
The simplicity of TWiki is mostly due to the fact that one can access and work on such a site simply by using a web-browser. It is not necessary to install any particular client software. To have an idea of how many users are really working with the TWiki, Table. 2 presents the number of collaborators who put material on the mentioned sites.
Implemented as CGI scripts in Perl, it works on port 80 without any special
firewall requirements. To assure transparency a revision control system (RCS) keeps track of changes and
all prior revisions are directly accessible.
The e-mail notification service1 makes use of the Net::SMTP Perl module
(alternatively sendmail).
TWiki.org, http://twiki.org
Wabi Sabi, http://www.art.unt.edu/ntieva/artcurr/asian/wabisabi.html