Online Collaboration Services

We provide an array of services that promote Team Science and facilitate online collaboration among working group participants, even after they have returned to their respective institutions. 

For help with any of the following services, contact a member of our computing staff directly or send them an email at help@nceas.ucsb.edu.

Each working group has access to the following and more:

Analytical servers 

Our most powerful system currently offers 384GB of RAM memory, along with 44 cores (CPUs), and several terabytes of fast storage. Several scientific software packages – such as R/RStudio, Python, Matlab, and QGIS – are already installed.

Private Web Areas

Each Working Group is entitled to a dedicated web area hosted on our servers. This service allows group members to download shared documents, references, data, and other files using a web browser. Group websites may be password-protected to prevent public access to data and documents that are under development.

Email Lists

We can set up email lists to manage communication among working group members. This makes it easier to ensure that all collaborators are receiving messages at their current addresses. In addition, all messages are threaded and archived. These archives can be linked to the group home page and viewed with a web browser.

Shared Server Accounts

Working groups, or more often a point-person in the group, can obtain a secure account on one of our servers. These accounts can be used to manage the private web areas, provide FTP access to files, run remote analyses, and/or interact with a database management system. Alternatively, the "visitor" account is a useful way to share files rapidly without needing to set up a new account. For data security, the contents of these accounts are archived on our nightly tape backups.

Remote Communication

We have multiple video conferencing systems available for remote collaboration upon request.