Applying modern collaboration methods to distributed engineering projects

Developing state of the art instrumentation for astronomy is often best done by geographically disparate teams that span several institutions. These efforts necessarily require costly face-to-face meetings and site visits. The benefits of the World Wide Web, video conferencing, and modular design techniques, however, have recently increased the efficiency and lowered the costs of these efforts. In this paper we discuss how these methods were applied during the development an emerging collaboration to produce common detector systems