How Not to Collaborate

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I posted a note a while back about an upcoming workshop at Microsoft Research on computational education for scientists. If you read the call for papers, you'll discover that there aren't any instructions on how to submit material; nor is there any contact information, other than the generic "contact us" link the bottom corner that gives you nothing more than Microsoft's generic 1-800 number ("press 1 for Windows Vista support..."). After bouncing around for five minutes, I got a human being who told me that she couldn't give out any phone numbers, but I was welcome to fax my question to them...

On the bright side, Microsoft is running another computational science conference this fall (in North Carolina).