Enabling collaborative engineering and science at JPL

We examine the issue of distributed collaboration at the Jet Propulsion Lab oratory (JPL). With the goals of "faster, better, cheaper" missions, an eff icient, seamless collaboration capability is critical to future JPL space e xploration missions. We assert that the current capabilities for distribute d collaboration internal to JPL, as well as external, are unsatisfactory. T his paper provides a vision of greatly enhanced distributed collaboration c apabilities in the near future and into the far future. Our vision focuses primarily on distributed collaborative engineering and science. We believe enhanced capabilities are necessary in two collaborative paradig ms: the virtual conference and the shared virtual workspace. We describe th ese collaborative paradigms, and discuss the tools that exist and the addit ional capability necessary to achieve the collaborative vision with respect to the types of data we typically work with at JPL. We identify the follow ing types of data frequently exchanged in collaborative activities: project planning data, design data, notes/documentation, communication data, analy sis/performance data, verification data and scientific data. Our analysis s hows that at present there is good GroupWare support for project planning d ata and notes/documentation data. Support is improving for design data. Oth er data types have no or sporadic support at best. (C) 2000 Elsevier Scienc e Ltd. All rights reserved.