We can provide a series of interactive and collaborative tools to reduce the burden of the "many to many" means of working in large loosely coupled groups.

It started out back in 1995, when in OMI we had 70+ projects, 300+ organisations and 1500+ people. How to keep all these people informed about what was going on without knowing who they all were? The web was just becoming mainstream, and solved the problem of one-way communication. The next problem was maintaining the information. It was only a matter of months before we moved to the site being driven from a database.

As we moved on to other clusters, we added the ability for users to submit and maintain the content. Current examples are PROMETEUS (www.prometeus.org) which has shared documents and files, messaging, and portal type pages that "steer" the information relevant to an individual.

On another site - Knowledge Square (K2 - www.know-2.org) there are also project management tools that we have developed with others. The latest addition to the features list is the facility for users to define their own groups and who can see what; users can also be other groups.

This provides a very sophisticated security mechanism suitable for projects and clusters, and will be especially useful for the management of large integrated projects and networks of excellence, where the management, coordination and administration will frequently be widely dispersed.

We concentrate on the functionality of the web sites - for most people, getting the right information as quickly as possible is more important than how attractive the graphics are. Of course, we can do all the fancy graphics - one of our consultants is a leading expert on virtual reality, especially applied to training systems.

As an example of the approach to functionality that we take, consider how many Word documents that you receive by email - sometimes several 100k bytes, only to find that the content is just a few paragraphs of text. On our sites, we provide document facilities that store smaller document texts like this in an on-line database. This makes them rapidly available, and makes access by bandwidth limited means more practical.