Differential Geometry of Gerbes and Differential Forms

We discuss certain aspects of the combinatorial approach to the differential geometry of non-abelian gerbes due to W. Messing and the author [5], and give a more direct derivation of the associated cocycle equations. This leads us to a more restrictive definition than in [5] of the corresponding coboundary relations. We also show that the diagrammatic proofs of certain local curving and curvature equations may be replaced by computations with differential forms.