The Polymath blog Collaborative research in mathematics

Collaborative working is widely used in the research area. A first example is collaborative writing of scientific papers or collaborative software for research (for example I am used to R statistical software).


It now becomes more challenging when people are trying to think on a problem in
a collaborative way.
This is the purpose of the mathematical project:

http://polymathprojects.org/general-polymath-rules/

which is driven by (among other) Fields Medal Terence Tao. The structure is
relatively simple: comments with a voting scheme relayed by a wiki. People are
trying to find the good rules, (called the polymath rules ) for example one of
them is

Rule 3:
3-This is not intended to be a race
between individuals; the purpose of the polymath experiment is to solve
problems collaboratively rather than
individually, by proceeding via a multitude of small observations and steps
shared between all participants.

See the rules here: http://polymathprojects.org/general-polymath-rules/

finally, there are already problems that have been solved that way and I think
mathematic is a good topic to experience thinking with hundreds of people
simultaneously because the chance to have ambiguity in a formulation is less
important. More interestingly, people acting in this type of projects are
gaining a very interesting experience in acting and thinking in a whole!