Avi Gold­farb presen­ted a fast, con­cise and effect­ive dis­cus­sion of what con­clu­sions could be drawn about multi-institutional col­lab­or­a­tion between US uni­ver­sit­ies dur­ing the era of Bit­NET adop­tion, 1981 — 1990. A bit of inter­net his­tory, my ears perked up imme­di­ately. His more gen­eral fram­ing ques­tion: How do changes in col­la­bour­a­tion cost change how we pro­duce know­ledge.
His study examined 270 insti­tu­tions as they con­nec­ted to the BiT­NET dur­ing this period and cross-indexed this with the num­ber of coau­thored journal art­icles sub­sequently pro­duced. Goldfarb’s paper ‘Restruc­tur­ing Research: Com­mu­nic­a­tion Costs and the Demo­crat­iz­a­tion of Uni­ver­sity Innov­a­tion’ con­cludes that col­lab­or­a­tion was enhanced, but that the gain to insti­tu­tions was not uni­formly real­ized and phys­ical dis­tance between col­la­bour­at­ors remained a factor. Read the rest of this entry »

Des­pite tech­nical dif­fi­culties (presenter’s worst night­mare — LCD pro­jector bulb burnout), Steve East­er­brook demon­strated the use­ful­ness of com­par­ing soft­ware struc­tures to social net­works of developers to meas­ure oper­a­tional effect­ive­ness. His well argued and logical present­a­tion ‘Increas­ing Shared Under­stand­ing in Soft­ware Teams through Informal Know­ledge Trans­fer Net­works’ exten­ded Conway’s Law to social net­work ana­lysis. This tech­nique of meas­ur­ing socio-technical con­gru­ence is espe­cially valu­able in lar­ger scale devel­op­ment pro­jects, where it is prob­ably less obvi­ous about whether a devel­op­ment pro­cess is func­tion­ing effect­iv­elly. By min­ing the data rich envir­on­ment of com­mu­nic­a­tion and revi­sion logs, it is pos­sible to gen­er­ate a social net­work map of developer inter­ac­tion that can be con­nec­ted to a soft­ware devel­op­ment schem­atic to determ­ine Socio-Technical con­gru­ence. Read the rest of this entry »