Enabling collaborative engineering and science at JPL

We examine the issue of distributed collaboration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). With the goals of “faster, better, cheaper” missions, an efficient, seamless collaboration capability is critical to future JPL space exploration missions. We assert that the current capabilities for distributed collaboration internal to JPL, as well as external, are unsatisfactory. This paper provides a vision of greatly enhanced distributed collaboration capabilities 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 paradigms: the virtual conference and the shared virtual workspace. We describe these collaborative paradigms, and discuss the tools that exist and the additional capability necessary to achieve the collaborative vision with respect to the types of data we typically work with at JPL. We identify the following types of data frequently exchanged in collaborative activities: project planning data, design data, notes/documentation, communication data, analysis/performance data, verification data and scientific data. Our analysis shows that at present there is good GroupWare support for project planning data and notes/documentation data. Support is improving for design data. Other data types have no or sporadic support at best.