The CODESH - COllaborative DEvelopment SHell - Project: Exploring New Levels of Collaboration

A key feature of collaboration in science and software development is to have a log of what and how is being done - for private use and reuse and for sharing selected parts with collaborators, which most often today are distributed geographically on an ever larger scale. Even better if this log is automatic, created on the fly while a scientist or software developer is working in a habitual way, without the need for extra efforts. The CODESH - COllaborative DEvelopment SHell - project addresses this problem in a novel way, building on the concepts of virtual state and virtual transition to provide an automatic persistent logbook for sessions of data analysis or software development in a collaborating group. A repository of sessions can be configured dynamically to record and make available the knowledge accumulated in the course of a scientific or software endeavor. Access can be controlled to define logbooks of private sessions and sessions shared within or between collaborating groups. The architecture, implementation, use cases from high energy physics and feedback from users will be discussed.