Editing a book on the world wide web with 29 collaborators in 8 countries in 12 months a case in survival tactics

We describe the techniques that we devised to enable authors who had never met physically to collaborate on a large-scale writing project. The goal was to use the Internet to simulate the close interactions that are possible in a traditional conference to foster cross-fertilization of ideas and to increase the coherence of the book we were writing. We discuss areas that should concern those who consider using the Internet for collaborative work.