CMS Centres Worldwide - a New Collaborative Infrastructure

The CMS Experiment at the LHC has established a network of fifty inter-connected "CMS Centres" at CERN and in institutes in Asia, Europe, Russia, South America, and the USA. These facilities are used by people doing CMS detector and Grid operations, remote shifts, data quality monitoring and analysis, as well as for education and outreach. We present the computing, software, and collaborative tools and videoconferencing systems. These include permanently-running "telepresence" video links (hardware-based H323, EVO and Vidyo), Webcasts, and generic Web tools such as CMS-TV for broadcasting live monitoring and outreach information. Being Web-based and experiment-independent, these systems could easily be extended to other organizations. We describe the experiences of using CMS Centres Worldwide in the CMS data-taking operations as well as for major media events with several hundred TV channels, radio stations, and many more press journalists simultaneously around the world.