Tag: me

Open Source Research

monday night was spent at HSG talking about open source, community dynamics, reputational games, marketing strategies, scalability issues, entrepreneurial aspects, parallels to the scientific process, open source versus open standards, and many more which i since forgot. in attendance were.

after a blogging pitch, michi and myself demonstrated the use of blogs for scholarly communication. with success, it seems, some are already toying with blogs, and with luck we will get blogs.ifb.unisg.ch up and running soon.

Hiring passion-driven people

You can’t really buy passion-driven people. You have to pay for them, of course, but they have to choose you. Passion-driven people are attracted by many things, but one of the biggest attractions is the desire to work with other passion-driven people who can challenge and appreciate them. As an organization grows, the challenge is to keep the bar high enough that critical mass can be maintained and new people will still continue to be attracted. It’s like running a nuclear reactor — if your fuel rods aren’t pure enough, you won’t be able to get/keep the reaction going; but if you enrich and purify the material, the reaction is self-perpetuating.

back at kpmg consulting, i tried to follow this rule of thumb as well. i only wanted to hire people that actually cared. as it turned out later, these people are rare. when the climate for innovation at kpmg consulting became hostile, i started to work on open source projects, which eventually led me to my current employer. all projects i’m involved in have to pass the radioactivity test. some are on the verge of no longer passing.

Social networks as killer app

alicia shares my interest in social networks / software, so i started a conversation with her, asking what she thought of the potential for social networks to emerge a killer app.

alicia: I think the current trend in social software right now is definitely to try and harness the power of small world network topology. I don’t think anything related to “friend of a friend” is going to become a killer app though unless:
1. the chains are kept short to the tune of 2-3 hops (we, for example, are separated by 4 or 5 friends on Friendster. This is WAY too long of a chain for either of us to really know anything about the other, despite the fact that we’re “connected”)
gregor: highly agreed. yet on the other hand, it allows for serendipity. in our smaller friends circle, it would be harder to cover as many interesting topics, because it’s much likelier that someone with the same interests is in a larger group.
alicia: yes…absolutely true…the problem is that Friendster is positioning the fact that “we’re all connected by friends” as if that should have reputational currency…as if that makes everyone in your personal network trustworthy. And that is definitely NOT necessarily the case.

alicia: 2. the software needs to include a way for people to gauge the affiliative (social) distance of the other users. So, for example, knowing that your favorite movie is Gremlins doesn’t help me contextualize how close/far you are from me socially as would knowing what schools you’ve gone to, where you grew up, where you’ve worked — the groups and organizations you’ve been affiliated with). Without a gauge of social distance, there’s too high a transaction cost to traversing the network in search of someone specific.

gregor: also very true. as we move to leverage these contacts, and make explicit what was implicit before, we will need new vocabulary and new ways to distinguish various levels of being connected.
alicia: yup. definitely agree. “friend” is being worked to death at the moment…and really, it doesn’t import well from software to software (a Friendster friend is different from a LiveJournal friend is different from a Ryze friend, etc) let alone from the virtual to the real.

Indians

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Dependencies

One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn’t just a Web server, it’s a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition. There was a lot of noise a couple of years ago about building corporate component libraries. But the problem is that by simply having that code there, you didn’t have the context.

software is plentiful these days, talent to make heads and tails of it not. who wants to write software from scratch? not me. i always found it more interesting to stitch something together from existing parts, usually losing interest after a solution started to manifest itself.

What always frustrated me, in computer science, was how we learned all the low-level things — which we have libraries for nowadays — but we didn’t learn large-scale integration. What’s the skill set to be able to jump into the code base of something like Mozilla, read the architecture docs, and figure out the makefiles? Computer science classes don’t teach you how to dive into foreign code bases.

you need capabilities to:

  • analyze and visualize a code base
  • identify the community leaders
  • learn the community customs
  • understand the real scope of a piece of software

It’s becoming a game of free agents, and by operating in this public and transparent way, free agents advertise themselves — as a brand — along with the products and components they have expertise with.

right on. no longer is software production a solitary discipline, with engineers huddled over manuals and out of sight in some cubicle. rather, in a world where you cant possibly write a significant portion of the code you gonna need, the person with the best social skills wins.