Thanks to an introduction to the Sage Math team by Fernando Perez, I just had the pleasure of participating in a large scale collaborative grant proposal construction exercise, co-ordinated Nicolas Thiéry. I’ve collaborated on grants before, but for me this was a unique experience because the grant writing was carried out in the open, on github.

The proposal, ‘OpenDreamKit’ is principally about doing as much as possible to smooth collaboration between mathematicians so that advances in maths can be delivered as rapidly as possible to teachers, researchers, technologists etc. Although, of course, I don’t have to tell you because you can read it on github.

It was a wonderful social experiment, and I think it really worked, although a lot of credit to that surely goes to the people involved (most of whom were there before I came aboard). I really hope this is funded, because collaborating with these people is going to be great.

For the first time on a proposal, I wasn’t the one who was most concerned about the latex template (actually second time … I’ve worked on a grant once with Wolfgang Huber). But this took things to another level, as soon as a feature was required the latex template seemed to be updated, almost in real time, I think mainly by Michael Kohlhase.

Socially it was very interesting, because the etiquette of how to interact (on the editing side) was not necessarily clear at the outset. For example, at one point I was tasked with proof reading a section, but ended up doing a lot of rephrasing. I was worried about whether people would be upset that their text had been changed, but actually there was a positive reaction (at least from Nicolas and Hans Fangohr!), which emboldened me to try more edits. As deadline approached I think others went through a similar transition, because the proposal really came together in the last few days. It was a little like a school dance, where at the start we were all standing at the edge of the room, eyeing each other up, but as DJ Nicolas ramped things up and the music became a little more hardcore (as dawn drew near), barriers broke down and everyone went a little wild. Nicolas produced a YouTube video, visualising the github commits.

As Alex Konovalov pointed out, we look like bees pollinating each other’s flowers!

I also discovered great new (for me) tools like appear.in that we used for brainstorming on ‘Excellence’ with Nicolas and Hans: much more convenient than Skype or Hangouts.

Many thanks to Nicolas, and all of the collaborators. I think it takes an impressive bunch of people to pull off such a thing, and regardless of outcome, which I very much hope will be positive, I look forward to further collaborations within this grouping.