TWiki Success Story of AstroGrid

AstroGrid is an project within the UK e-Science arena. Funded by PPARC, the project's aim is to produce an infrastructure upon which a uk-based Virtual Observatory can be built, as well as to create the first components of the UK-VO.

I was hired as the project manager in November 2001. The project is a consortium of seven institutes spread all over the UK. I decided to implement web-based tools to assist with the team collaboration. These tools were:

• a news site: where people could look for day-to-day information updates
• a forum: for longer discussions
• and a wiki: for document-based collaborations

The wiki has been the outstanding success of the three. There was considerable suspicion at first - the scientists did not like the idea of having all their working documents being seen by everyone, they thought it would be quickly and easily vandalised. But they trusted my judgement and worked with it and it is now part of the working life of the project.

One considerable measure of its success is how it has been taken up by other VO projects:

• Euro-VO
• Aus-VO
• EGSO

and even the international organisation that we've set up:

• IVOA

All of these have taken my lead and decided to implement TWiki.

So, many thanks Guys, you've helped the cause of scientific collaboration considerably

-- TonyLinde - 08 Feb 2003