How should I use this site?
John Reekie, 21 Sep 1999
Last updated: 14 Nov 2004

If you are involved with the GSRC, you should be taking advantage of the features provided by the workspace support built into this site. The concept and implementation of a workspace gives you a number of things, depending on how you choose to look at it:

• An identity within and association with the GSRC web-site and therefore with the GSRC.
• A web-based workspace in which to collaborate with other researchers.
• A tier of interaction-vs-formality trade-offs for sharing your work and your results with other collaborators and researchers.
• A set of mechanism to enable you to communicate and collaborate with researchers outside of your institution more easily.
• A set of useful features that you would have had to set up to build a useful research-oriented site anyway:
  1. Mailing lists
  2. Shared files
  3. A search engine

Anyway, to answer the question :-). To make effective use of this site, you should be actively participating in a workspace. Typically, you would be a member of a small group of people working on a clearly-identifiable research area or software project. This group of people owns an area of this site, called a workspace, which is listed on the workspaces page. (All workspaces are also listed on the front page of this site.) They are also members of a corresponding permissions group.

Now, the key to making (and encouraging) effective use of the site is understanding the different levels of interaction and formality available to you. There is no set formula enforced by the site, just a collection of mechanisms that allow you to choose and evolve the most effective way of working with them. Briefly:

• Email lists are the most informal mechanism. Each workspace can have a number of mailing lists and automatic email archiving.
• Forums and FAQs are the next less mechanism. These interactive web pages allow you to post information to this server to (selectively) share with other researchers.
• The workgroup's "home page" is the next less formal mechanism. The home page is hand-authored (as opposed to automatically-generated) HTML, thus allowing you to present a polished and complete view of your research to the world at large.
• Software releases and journal and conference publications are the most formal mechanism. You can post your publications to this site's publication database.