The scientific community is large and growing more tightly networked: if you imagine a graph in which the nodes are researchers and edges (maybe directed!) are communications volume, there is exponential growth both in connectedness (how many direct neighbors each node has, i.e., how many other researchers are is the given researcher communicating with) and bandwidth (what are the weights, i.e., communication volume).
In order to support this growth, a huge variety of collaboration tools have sprung up; some of them are very old, and some are very new. The usual theme of this course continues: that new is not necessarily better, and that careful mixing of new and old technologies can give you the best of both worlds.
In this lecture we will discuss
communications channels - different ways collaborators have of communicating, and what are the visible and hidden advantages and disadvantages of each method
version control systems - how can people asynchronously collaborate? why is asynchronous collaboration important?
quality control - how can you remain convinced of the reliability of your results, when the code generating them is constantly changing?