While cooking dinner I get stamping pads and make a couple of potato stamps for the little guy. He haven’t stamped before, at least not with me, so I show him how to do it and ask to stamp on the paper, not on the table.

In ten minutes he brings the stamps back to me and tells that he wants to stamp with his hands. I say, “no, you are not supposed to stamp with your hands”.

“Waarom niet?” he asks, with that sweet inquisitive voice that we’ve learnt to live with in the last couple of months.

And then it hits me: why not?

Because you are supposed to stamp with stamps, not with hands? Because there will be a lot of mess and I’m busy? Because I said so?

I tend to question things taken for granted and authority myself, but he takes it further, questioning things I wouldn’t think about and my authority. I want him to learn making his own choices, but I also want him to learn that there are rules in this world and there are others to consider. I don’t know if the stains that will come from his stamping pads are washable and I can only assume that it’s safe on his skin. And I have dinner to cook, so I can’t closely supervise him to make sure that everything around him wouldn’t get colored.

I think again – about the things I want him to learn the most. Not how to stamp “right”. Not that I’m the boss to be listened to. Not that the rules have to be followed even if they don’t make any sense. I want him to be creative, not being afraid to make his own choices, but also to consider the impact of his actions, to take care of others in the process and to take the responsibility for what comes out of it.

So I tell him it’s ok to stamp with his hands. I explain that in then there are higher chances of staining his clothes and the things around. I ask him to put a smock, to be careful and to tell me when he is done, so we can wash the hands immediately.

And he does.

Nothing scary happens, just a bit of color on the table – but this is something that happens every day. He comes to wash his hands and I share the worry that we wouldn’t be able to wash the color off. We start washing and then I share his delight when the color disappears. So little to pay for the fun of discovery…

I can only hope that he learns his lessons, but I know I can learn mine.

***

I leave stamping pads at his table. Next time he doesn’t ask, he doesn’t put a smock, but he comes to us trying not to touch anything with his blue hands when he is done. And he tells the story about his painting – big waves, sun and a bear on a boat.

• Reboot 9.0: conversation about work, us and our kids?
• Blog as an edge zone
• What I’m doing these days

Just reflecting on a couple of cases where team performance – by design – depends a lot on sharing the same room. Sharing a room is good for productivity and builds on all kinds of powerful activities that happen in  physical space. However, there are a couple of issues with that.

Operating in a shared space makes various interactions informal and their value implicit – everyone is there, questions are asked and answered, insights and artefacts shared, actions observed. However, this means that if someone is not in the room for whatever reason (ill, off-site, etc.) they miss important bits and don’t have an idea of what they have missed. Strong reliance on sharing a space usually means that there are not many backup information flows (to revisit from a distance or later) and that communication practices are not well articulated (so it’s difficult to change them or “move” to another – digital – format if the need arises).

Sharing a room creates convergence, but also thicker group boundaries. Developing shared understanding of what and how have to be done is great for getting things done, but also “locks” the team in it’s own practice. This makes it more difficult to change and to incorporate external influences. And it’s difficult to extend a group like that since it’s difficult for a newcomer to get “up to speed” fast and to bring own ideas to the table.

So, where a team room makes sense?

• projects that are more about getting things done than about interconnections
• projects with little travel or flexible work
• relatively short term projects, so needs to extend the group or change it’s practices are not that likely

Doesn’t mean that teams shouldn’t share rooms in all other cases, just that they have to make sure that they articulate their own practices and establish alternative mechanisms for developing awareness,  communicating and creating opportunities for incorporating external influences.

• Effects of reading someone else’s feeds
• Blog networking and crossing boundaries for CPsqure research and dissertation fest
• Edges

It feels strange now, almost at the end of my PhD work, to come back to the themes and topics from the beginning of it. Like a few weeks ago, when the post by Jack Vinson brought back the metaphor of a weblog as a front porch from the discussions in 2004.

I’ve been playing with city-related metaphors for a long time, heavily inspired by the book by Danish architect Jan Gehl “Life between buildings“. Now I tie together multiple fragments of it in a final chapter of my dissertation, using it to explain the ‘front porch’ nature of blogging and its impact for emergent social processes. Below is a piece from the current draft…

***

As the findings of this dissertation illustrate, blogging supports creating relations with unknown and unexpected others, often across various boundaries. It starts from being present as a blogger, finding and observing others; then possibly engaging in an interaction that might grow into a relation. In his study of social activities in urban places Jan Gehl (2001) describes relations in similar way starting from “see and hear contacts” that might eventually grow into a closer relation. In analysing the conditions for those contacts and for emergent interaction in public spaces in a city he stresses the importance of edge zones:

At the edge of the forest or near the façade, one is less exposed than if one is out in the middle of a space. One is not in the way of anyone or anything. One can see, but not be seen too much, and the personal territory is reduced to a semicircle in front of the individual. When one’s back is protected, others can approach only frontally, making it easy to keep watch and to react, for example, by means of a forbidding facial expression in the event of undesired invasion of personal territory.

The edge zone offers a number of obvious practical and psychological advantages as a place to linger. Additionally, the area along the façade is the obvious outdoor staying area for the residents and functions of the surrounding buildings. It is relatively easy to move a function out of the house to the zone along the façade. The most natural place to linger is the doorstep, from which it is possible to go farther out into the space or remain standing. Both physically and psychologically it is easier to remain standing than to move out into the space. One can always move farther later on, if desired (Gehl, 2001, pp. 151-152).

Weblogs are similar to the edge zones in cities. As a personal space in public a weblog provides a unique opportunity for combining the characteristics of both – being in control and feeling protected in one’s own space (Gumbrecht, 2004) and being exposed to others and open for a communication.

Drawing parallels between blogging and social life in cities allows identifying several conditions for emergent social activities in a case of weblogs. One, mentioned above, is personal control and safety, providing an opportunity to “linger” comfortably in public. Other conditions include: a legitimate reason to be in public, an opportunity to see and be seen, and switching between inward- and outward-oriented activities.

Edge zones often provide one with a legitimate reason to be in public as long as one wants to without necessarily doing anything ‘social’ – for example, having a coffee or reading a book in a front garden of one’s house. In this context Jan Gehl also talks about “excursions as excuses” (2001, pp. 117-119), describing a number of observations indicating that some activity meaningful for a person appears to be a pretext or an occasion for social contact:

Among the requirements that are satisfied, in part, in public spaces are the need for contact, the need for knowledge, and the need for stimulation. These belong to the group of psychological needs. Satisfying these is seldom as goal-oriented and deliberate as with the more basic physical needs, such as eating, drinking, sleeping and so on. For example, adults seldom go to town with the expressed intention of satisfying the need for stimulation or the need for contact. Regardless of the true purpose may be, one goes out for a plausible, rational reason – to shop, to take a walk, to get some fresh air, to buy a paper, to wash the car, and so forth (Gehl, 2001, p. 117).

Blogging can support various personal activities that do not require interaction. One can always think of a weblog in terms of conversations with self or publishing: blogging as “writing for myself”, “publishing to the world” or “learning from others” provides an excuse to linger in public.

Being in public in a city implies that one has an opportunity to see what’s going on and to be seen, without a necessity to interact. In a case of weblogs “seeing” is reading, made more efficient by news aggregators and various notification services that allow bloggers to keep track of interesting things happening. Writing a weblog makes its author present in a blogosphere and visible to others. This visibility provides an opportunity for low-intensity contacts, exposure and lurking that do not require the commitment and effort of an interaction, but create starting points for more intensive engagement.

Finally, to be able to engage with others further one needs an opportunity to switch easily between inward- and outward-oriented activities, those personally meaningful and those engaging others, for example, by stopping to talk with a friend met on a street. With weblogs it is about switching modes: what started as publishing or conversation with self can turn into an interaction when others comment or link to a weblog post. As a conversation in a middle of a street, interacting via weblogs is not the most convenient way to talk, however, it is spontaneous and easy to move in a more appropriate space if there is a need for it or to stop if one is in a hurry.

As an edge zone as weblog provides a personal space in public. Although there is the pressure of social norms and perceived expectations of one’s audience, the personal nature of blogging means that there is still more freedom in what to write and how to do it than in many other online spaces, which are often guided by topical focus or reinforced group practices. Blogging can also be more open-ended and less focused on an interaction with specific others, for example, writing email with ‘an interesting idea that you might be able to comment on’ to all acquaintances would be rude, while a weblog provides a natural space for it. However, at the same time weblog is a form of communication aimed at others – like being in public reveals one’s personality through exposing appearance and actions, writing a weblog exposes the author’s values and way of thinking through the style of writing and choices about content.

• Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)
• Excursions as excuses
• BlogWalk Seattle: people

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While blogging might provide a window onto practices of the blogger, on a surface weblog is just an artefact: text, links and bits of other media. In this post I reflect on the ways blogging helps to cross boundaries through information exchange and non-personal connections, using the concept of boundary object as a starting point. This concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), who used it to describe how practices of different social worlds are coordinated:

Boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393)

My original interest in using the concept of boundary objects in respect to blogging comes from the term itself (weblog is an object that works across various boundaries), so my treatment of it deviates from the way it is usually used. I use it to refer to an object at a boundary of different perspectives that include those of an individual, rather than to an object at an intersection between social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989) or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). In addition, boundary objects are defined through their use for coordinating different perspectives (for example, this point is emphasised by Wenger, 1998, pp. 107-108), while in the case of blogging coordination between perspectives is often an accidental side-effect, rather than intentional.

Those differences might warrant the need to introduce an alternative terminology, however I leave it for further work and focus on parallels between boundary objects and weblogs: artefacts-based connections between different perspectives that do not require personal engagement and characteristics that enable those connections.

Contrasting the role of boundary objects in crossing boundaries between communities of practice with brokering, Wenger emphasises that artefact-based connections “can transcend the spatiotemporal limitations inherent in participation” (Wenger, p. 110), since artefacts can travel easier than people, however, uprooted from specific practices, artefacts are also a source of ambiguity and misinterpretation. Studies, presented in my dissertation show that weblogs have a potential to connect different perspectives without requiring personal engagement. For example, readers of my weblog pick up bits of the research relevant for them; KM bloggers use weblogs to establish information relations next to those of more personal nature. The Microsoft case provides a view on how far information can travel via weblogs, as well as an idea of challenges of misinterpretation it can bring.

Based on the different types of boundary objects described by Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), Wenger proposes a number of characteristics “enabling artefacts to act as boundary objects” (Wenger, 2001, 107):

1) Modularity: each perspective can attend to one specific portion of the boundary object (e.g., a newspaper is a heterogeneous collection of articles that has something for each reader).

2) Abstraction: all perspectives are served at once by deletion of features that are specific for each perspective (e.g., a map abstracts from the terrain only certain features, such as distance and elevation).

3) Accommodation: the boundary object lends itself to various activities (e.g., the office building can accommodate the various practices of its tenants, its caretakers, its owners, and so forth).

4) Standardization: the information contained in a boundary object is in a prespecified form so that each constituency knows how to deal with it locally (for example, a questionnaire that specified how to provide some information by answering certain questions).

Those characteristics are useful to view what enables weblogs to serve as connectors across various perspectives.

Modularity and standardisation are inherent to weblogs: blogging is about bits of microcontent (weblog posts), connected within and across weblogs by standardised structure and protocols. When finding a new weblog, those familiar with the medium, know how to deal with it (e.g. distinguish specific posts and their metadata, browse through the archives or subscribe to the updates). Specific weblog posts, accompanied by permalinks, can be accessed without the rest of the weblog. This allows information presented in a weblog to travel far outside of the original contexts where it was created.

The potential of a weblog to accommodate various activities is not immediately obvious: on a surface it is an instrument for low-threshold publishing that allows reaching broad audiences without pushing information to them. However, the results of the studies presented in my dissertation suggest that it may also support conversations with self and interactions with specific others (more on publishing vs. interaction, conversations with self and conversations with others).

A combination of those three modes supports accommodation for various practices of different constituencies. An individual blogger might use weblog for a conversation with self – articulating thoughts and feelings, organising own digital bits or reflecting on the traces left over time in retrospect. Publishing makes one’s weblog traces exposed, so others can learn from them without necessarily engaging directly with the blogger. On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for interaction and engaging in-depth, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts.

Finally, since multiple perspectives are served at once, weblogs also exhibit a degree of abstraction, for example, when specific details of one’s work or personal situation is omitted to make possible sharing the essence in public and knowing that the author himself or those “who know” can read between the lines to reconstruct missing details. Abstraction also makes information presented in a weblog accessible and relevant to broader and varied audiences, while also increasing a chance for misinterpretation.

In sum, while not necessarily fully fitting in a definition of a boundary objects, weblogs exhibit characteristics that make them effective in establishing artefact-based connections across boundaries of different social world.

• Learning webs: introducing weblogs to support communities
• Weblog as knowledge networker instrument: questions
• An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While to an extend weblogs do represent bloggers behind them and are often perceived as their online identities, studies presented in my dissertation also indicate that blogging involves many challenges of dealing with different audiences that a weblog serves (the results of blog networking study provide examples of both). Blogging in a context of knowledge work requires balancing interests of self and others, peers and customers, close friends and occasional lurkers, or those of people coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. From this perspective I find useful the discussion of identity in relation to participation in different communities of practice by Etienne Wenger (1998, p.159):

Our various forms of participation delineate pieces of a puzzle we put together rather than sharp boundaries between disconnected parts of ourselves. An identity is thus more than just a single trajectory; instead, it should be viewed as a nexus of multimemberhsip. As such a nexus, identity is not a unity but neither is it simply fragmented.

• On the one hand, we engage in different practices in each of the communities of practice to which we belong. We often behave rather differently in each of them, construct different aspects of ourselves, and gain different perspectives.
• On the other hand, considering a person as having multiple identities would miss all the subtle ways in which our various forms of participation, no matter how distinct, can interact, influence each other, and require coordination.

The notion of nexus adds multiplicity to the notion of trajectory. A nexus does not merge the specific trajectories we form in out various communities of practice into one; but neither does it decompose our identity into distinct trajectories in each community. In a nexus, multiple trajectories become part of each other, whether they clash or reinforce each other. They are, at the same time, one and multiple.

When one belongs to different social worlds, being a one person requires what Wenger discusses as reconciliation, the process of constructing an identity that can integrate “different meanings and forms of participation into one nexus” (p.160).

Although usually participation in different social worlds is somewhat separated in time and space (e.g. being a colleague at work and a parent at home, while still maintaining a single identity of a working parent), blogging brings it into a single space and sometimes even into a single moment, when a blogpost is written to capture one’s experiences between those worlds (for example). In this case different forms of participation collapse creating a living resolution of a boundary. In addition, the work of reconciliation, usually very personal and invisible (p.161), leaves publicly visible traces when bloggers use their weblogs in different contexts.

Wenger discusses participative connection across community boundaries as brokering, which is defined as “use of multimembership to transfer some elements of one practice into another” (p.109):

The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end brokering is provides a participative connection – not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multimembership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in practice.

While brokering is not necessarily an intentional activity of a blogger, the co-existence and reconciliation of different perspectives in a singe weblog might results in accidental brokering. In this case elements of practices are transferred across boundaries as bloggers address conflicting interests and translate between different perspectives through their writing – not because they planned to do so but since this is what being able to write in a single weblog requires – providing their readers with an opportunity to “visit” practices different from their own.

In this case weblog provides a window onto practice, supporting learning trough legitimate peripheral participation as it allows “to look through it onto as much actual practice as it can reveal, to see to increasingly greater depths, and to collaborate in exploration” (Brown&Duguid, 1992, for more see Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks). Access to practices of others in this way requires time and effort of picking up contextual cues “between the lines” and establishing relations needed for joint exploration. However, weblogs also provide an alternative way to peek into other worlds that does not necessarily requires the effort of engaging in person, but rather allows connecting through artefacts.

• Finding confidence while bridging multiple research practices
• Finding confidence
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography

I’m still alive, but quiet: struggling to come up with the first draft of the final chapter of my dissertation and preparing for a conversation at SPsquare research and dissertation fest tomorrow. I’ll be talking about some puzzling things in the blog networking study and my current explanations for them.

Slides and some notes are below, but since it’s very much work-in-progress it might be better to join the discussion tomorrow (20:00 GMT, Skype/phone, contact me for the details) or wait till I blog it.

.

Puzzling things:

• asymmetries – see Getting to know others from a distance
• non-personal relations (“information relationships”, “no ties”) – see Dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it brings
• identity management? – see Presenting oneself trough blogging
• crossing boundaries – see Participants and their networks, Finding and being found, Presenting oneself trough blogging

Blog networking

• Finding and being found
• Getting to know others from a distance
• Bonding through interaction
• Getting things done
• Staying in touch

Publication vs. interaction – will add a link when blogged.

I use weblog of Nancy White as an example, so you may want to check it and the summary of interview with her.

Key publications I refer to:

• affinity/commitment/attention
  • Nardi, B. A. (2005). Beyond bandwidth: dimensions of connection in interpersonal communication. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(2), 91-130. doi:10.1007/s10606-004-8127-9
• crossing boundaries
  • Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(4), 387-420. doi:10.1177/030631289019003001
  • Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.

• ECSCW07 workshop on social software – Employee blogging: personal or work-related?
• Weblog networking: two way awareness and different degrees of strength
• WBC04: day 3 morning

This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

How bloggers find each other? Study participants find new bloggers by attracting them with their own writing, through their network and in places where they meet bloggers they already know.

One way to discover others is writing own weblog, which then serves as “a conversation starter”, “a big neon sign that invites others to come and comment” (Ton). With multiple instruments that weblogs provide it is easy to get notified about comments to one’s weblog or links from other blogs. Bloggers follow trackbacks or subscribe to notification about referrals to their pages (e.g. via Technorati or Google blogsearch). Nancy, who had a web-site people linked to before, credits this attention to incoming links that is part of blogging as the reason for “discovering” people in her network that she was not aware of.

Those who comment on one’s blog writing are not random people. Bloggers appreciate the attention to their own work and the effort taken to comment: “the people who link to you are interesting, because they found your ideas interesting, they comment” (Dave). Monica indicates that commenting on blogs was not the obvious way to grow one’s professional network when she started: “I didn’t realise that linking and giving credits to someone’s work would extend my professional network very quickly”.

Another way to find other bloggers is through following links from people already in one’s own network, who provide filtering and recommendation:

it’s a collective pointing that helps to find stuff, once you have an established group of bloggers you read and trust. And their ability to find a good stuff to point to it increases your signal to noise ratio on the web. [...] Blogs do that better than other tools because of the context – you have to say why that is important, why you are pointing to something. (Euan)

Finally, bloggers find other bloggers in places where they go to interact with those they already know. Although usually these are events that bloggers attend to meet each other in person, they could be online places as well: Ton gives an example of a German blogger whom he first “met” in a comments section of an American weblog.

Given that bloggers indicated that their blogging connections often extremely diverse I ask what exactly contributes to finding others across boundaries. Nancy suggests that it is the public nature of weblogs and their discoverability as a result of cross-linking. She adds that comparing to communities, where there is usually an “agreement what it’s all about even if it’s about nothing”, with a weblog it is more easy “to cross over” between topics both when writing and reading.

This crossing becomes easier as weblogs are person-centred – “a weblog is about me even if you think you write about a topic” (Martin). They also represent different interests of their authors (“most of the times I read them for KM, but find something else”, Gabriela) and readers may value the diversity of topics covered (“good bloggers are eclectics, they do different things, they surprise you [...] that is what keeps you going back”, Dave).

In addition, at first blogging is “connecting through content” (Nancy). When one follows a link to a new weblog, blogger’s words are visible, while the details about the author (such as age, gender, professional affiliations or place in various hierarchies) are not necessarily on the surface or made explicit at all. As a result, with blogging “you can’t live of your reputation, you live of what you say” (Dave).

In the process of discovering interesting others weblogs serve as attractors and filters. From one side presenting oneself to the world through writing a weblog attracts others who resonate with this writing and comment or link back. From other side, weblogs work as filters: links by bloggers one reads provides not only pointing to potentially interesting others, but also personal recommendation. Since weblogs are rather person-centred than strictly focused on a predefined topic, a blogger often writes about a variety of personally relevant issues, exposing readers to potentially new and unexpected topical areas and other bloggers within those.

While finding others may result in a direct interaction (e.g. continuing a conversation in a weblog comments), it is not always so. The following post describes how it is possible to get to know other bloggers from a distance, without any interaction.

• Converted to RSS reading :)
• The power of loose ends (3) or the weakness of weblogs when it comes to joint actions
• Blog networking and crossing boundaries for CPsqure research and dissertation fest

I’ve been thinking for a while on weblogs as boundary objects (and bloggers as boundary subjects :). I don’t think I’m 100% on classical definitions here, but don’t be angry – I need to play with the idea to see what comes out of it.

Also: you may want to read Denham on boundary objects here and here

My interest in blogging pretty much defined by the fact that weblogs cross boundaries – this is where the most of fun lies and the most of troubles occur. So, when conceptmapping some PhD thinking today I came up with this branch (I have to admit that this is not a generic case, but reference to my own research):

So, what shapes my own blogging practices (these are different angles of the same thing):

Contexts where blogging has to fit: my personal practices (e.g. those of dealing with information, technologies or time), practices of people around me (e.g. norms of communication) and practices of the organisation I work for (e.g. regarding confidentiality).

Communities I belong to (this overlaps with the previous category – have to think what to do with it). Those shape at least two aspects – themes that run through my blog and ways of doing things. Theme-wise I’m influenced by topical communities (e.g. KM vs. learning vs. technology), but there are also differences at the level of doing (e.g. researchers vs. practitioners).

Another way to look at blogging is it’s position on the edge between public and private – it has elements of control and safety of my own space and exposure of being in public.

Finally, research-wise my weblog is used in several ways: blogging is a way to participate in the communities I study, it’s an instrument for collecting and analyseing the data and it’s a publication medium. Normally those things would be separated (at least by time, space and audiences).

Semi-related earlier posts (the list is mainly for myself since suprisingly I don’t have a tag where those things would be collected):

• Third culture kids and research kunstkamera
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: blogging as a person or as an employee
• AOIR: Not documenting, doing: blogging as research
• Edges
• Individual in a public space: learning from weblogs and cities
• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• Blog networking, blogwalking and being a boundary subject
• Weblogs: conversations with self and conversations with others
• Personal ways of doing things in public
• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?
• A Socio-Technological Approach to Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/04.html#a1794; comments are here.

• PhD blogging and paper writing
• On passion, imperfections, confessional writing and fears (re: dissertation goes to a printer)
• Who owns narrated experiences? (2)

It’s a strange day – connecting dots, connecting people…

On echo chambers earlier today and in my aggregator now -

Blogs shape opinions, that once formed, become entrenched. (Shel Israel and Robert Scoble)

And then two different worlds click and connect – how boundary spanning works? Back to the talk.

BlogHer dinner – connecting names and faces, blogstalkers…

And behind all this the need to associate, to belong, to be there and the need to step aside, to observe, to reflect. Wondering if this is a methodology problem or personality trait. It’s all there – interdisciplinarity, identity crisis, being a boundary subject…

So, how connecting the dots works?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/07/30.html#a1626; comments are here.

• KM Europe: summary
• Personal effectiveness, improvement.ru and boundary spanning
• Finding confidence

A summary of The “Swiss Pattada”: Designing the ultimate tool by Giorgio De Michelis (but you should read it yourself :).

The paper uses metaphors of the Swiss Army Knife and the Sardinian Pattada to discuss multiplicity and openess in technologies we use.

Most people have an idea what is the Swiss Army Knife, so just a quote about the Sardinian Pattada:

…this one an Italian pocketknife that dates back to the 15th century [1], is a folding model that opens to a length of 15 to 35 cm (not to be confused with the switchblade). Farmers and shepherds always carried it with them to do all sorts of jobs in the fields or simply to have on hand during long periods away from home. Versions vary depending on the area or region of Italy. [...]

The Sardinian Pattada is available in a variety of sizes and features a sharp myrtle-leaf-shaped blade with a whetted point. The Pattada is suitable for all kinds of tasks, both on the job and in the home (slicing, forking, carving). It’s not only a good means of self-defense, it is also used by shepherds for operating on cattle and for taking care of personal hygiene (shaving, clipping fingernails). Thanks to this universal tool, the shepherd can avoid travelling with a large number of cutting implements.

Although a two-sided bovine horn handle facilitates the Pattada’s multiplicity of uses, the Pattada demands a particular skill in handling. An inexperienced person risks getting hurt with a knife like this, somewhat in the same way he would if—unaccustomed to doing so—he tried to shave with a barber’s straight razor. (pp.46-47)

On multiplicity and openness:

…the Swiss Army Knife is a tool rich in multiplicity and the Sardinian Pattada is rich in openness [3]. An object is multiple if it involves a collection of specialized parts, one for each of the jobs we want to do; it is open if it consists of a single component that we can use for various purposes in various instances. Multiplicity and openness make sense in complex situations in which monofunctional tools are too narrow and rigid. Multiplicity connects well with specialization in that each function finds in it an ad hoc answer, whereas openness connects well with universality because the more an implement can be used for any task at all (including unforeseen ones), the more open it is.

Multiplicity favors the quality of each single function over ease of access to the function, and openness makes it easy to shift from one function to the next at the cost of giving only an approximate answer to each. Thus multiplicity and openness meet the same needs but in diverse ways. We can consider each a different paradigm for dealing with complex situations. (pp.47-48)

Giorgio argues that while in the physical world combining multiplicity and openness (the “Swiss Pattada”) may be impossible, computers make it more and more possible (think of a text editor that supports drawing). He also introduces another attribute: continuity.

Finally, a piece that has something to do with my yesterdays post.

We must also emphasize, however, that, as with objects in general (whether static, mechanical, or electronic), the evolution of computers themselves has not been uniform in achieving greater openness and multiplicity; in many cases development has concerned improvement of a single function, ignoring the question of its integration with multifunction systems. (p.50)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/27.html#a1305; comments are here.

• Excursions as excuses
• Blogs as boundary objects
• Blogging as boundary practice