Serverless social software for nomadic collaboration

Abstract

Recent portable devices, from sophisticated mobile phones, to netbooks, thanks to wireless networking and powerful batteries, give hardware support for collaborative work on the go, even when the Internet connection is not available. Yet, current collaboration software requires a dedicated server to synchronize clients, and thus a stable network connection. In this chapter, we present two tools that use peer-to-peer paradigm to build serverless collaboration networks. PBDMS enables users to share, search and review bibliographic databases. SharedMind provides collaborative document editing to FreeMind, popular, open source mind-mapping software. Both tools handle disconnections and network divisions, enabling users to continue their work and to synchronize with their reachable peers. Both tools have been implemented and tested in small scale. PBDMS is available for download at http://code.google. com/p/bibliographicsocialinfosys/; SharedMind is available at http://code.google.com/p/sharedmind. We believe that such seamless, flexible collaboration applications provide the degree of freedom promised by the recent portable devices, yet not fully used by the current applications. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.