Collaboratories to support distributed science: the example of international HIV/AIDS research

ABSTRACTThe use of collaborative technologies to support geographically distributed scientific research (or collaboratories) is gaining wide acceptance in many parts of the developed world. Such collaboratories hold great promise for international cooperation in critical areas of scientific research, such as HIV/AIDS. We have extensive experience with the design, development, deployment and evaluation of such collaboratories in a number of areas of science and engineering. We have identified a number of critical success factors, and discuss three in particular: collaboration readiness, collaboration infrastructure readiness, and collaboration technology readiness. We have recently begun the baseline assessment of two collaboratory opportunities for international HIV/AIDS collaboration, one in Botswana and one in Durban, South Africa. We present our preliminary assessment of the prospects and challenges for developing these collaboratories.