Santa Fe Institute
To support development of the ARCH platform for virtual collaboration of academic communities
ARCH is a collaboration platform for small communities of intellectual inquiry. It integrates open source chat and videoconferencing tools with a sophisticated commenting and annotation engine for videos and transcripts, collaborative notetaking and document editing, and document sharing capabilities. In the wake of Covid-19 disruptions, the Santa Fe Institute realized that ubiquitous industry technologies like Zoom were ill-suited to extend into a hybrid space the rich collaborations and sub-communities that drive their research. In an effort led by SFI Vice President for Applied Complexity, Will Tracy, ARCH has been piloted successfully in a small number of events, including a 16-institution research network as well as a global SFI summer school. Funds from this grant support these activities, as well as the further development, documentation, research, and packaging of the ARCH platform so it can be used at wider scale both inside SFI and beyond.