A DECENTRALIZED CONFERENCING TOOL FOR AD HOC DISTRIBUTED WORKGROUPS

Open source software (OSS) projects are an extreme case of geographically distributed development, with individual developers scattered throughout the world. In addition to relying upon asynchronous communication tools, a number of OSS project members use chat-based communication tools, mainly for bug triage and rapid decision-making about project evolution. However, simple chats do not fit well the needs of structured meetings. This paper presents P2PConference, a tool to conduct text-based conferences over a distance. The tool provides basic features for simple brainstorming sessions as well as more sophisticated features to accommodate the needs of other types of meetings, such as presentations and panels. P2PConference requires no infrastructure and administration costs since it adopts a decentralized architecture and it is implemented upon the JXTA peer-to-peer platform. The decentralized architectural solution makes the tool well suited to support ad hoc distributed workgroups.