IDC PhD/MSc seminar

Anders gave a presentation this Tuesday at the IDC Ph.D./Master seminar organised by Annette Aboulafia, with the participation of Prof. Niels Engelsted, Dept of Psychology, University of Copenhagen & Prof. Arne Poulsen, Dept, of Psychology and Pedagogic, University of Roskilde.

The aim of the seminar was twofold:

• to present a variety of understandings of human relationships in relation to a a research project titled 'What-do-I-call-you-mom?', in which Annette, Niels and Arne are collaborating.
• a discussion on IDC Ph.D./Master projects. The participants were asked to write a 1-2 page abstract of their research question or idea, planned contribution to the field and their methods. This was the starting point for discussion.

Anders presented his PhD research proposal: "Information technology and learning in practice: A study of work practices and learning in globally distributed software development projects".

Dr. Marilyn Lennon!

Yesterday was a big day for the IDC, because it was the day when Marilyn Lennon, one of the students from the first year of the IMedia program, had her viva. She passed with flying colours, receiving praise from her supervisor Prof. Liam Bannon for a solid and admirable defence of here thesis, and thus became the first PhD graduate who originated in the IMedia program!

Congratulations, Marilyn!

Afterwards there was a reception at the IDC office, attended by a mix of old school IDC:ers (among them some of Marylins classmates from the IMedia course) and the new generation, as well as other friends and well-wishers. Gabriela and Lui took some pictures and they are available here and here respectively.

More details about the theis and the viva is on the IDC blog.

Workshop at ECSCW'07 accepted!

Our proposal for organising a workshop on The Challenges of Collaborative Work in Global Software Development at the ECSCW'07 conference was accepted and the call for participation is out!

Here's an excerpt from the call:

This one day workshop aims to bring together researchers studying different aspects of computer-supported cooperative work in Global Software Development(GSD).

Suggested topics include:

1. Conceptual understanding of work practices in GSD (issues related to collaboration, coordination, articulation work)
2. Project management in GSD (different models for organizing the work – from distributed teams through to outsourcing relationships and open source communities, cross-cultural issues, team selection, facilitation)
3. Social and behavioral studies of collaboration and coordination in GSD by individuals or teams
4. Collaborative software tools used in GSD:
- software configuration management, version control, bug tracking systems;
- communication tools (email, mailing lists, Instant Messaging, chats, electronic meeting room support, videoconferencing);
- blogs, wikis, social bookmarking;
- expertise finder and social networking applications;
- knowledge repositories: knowledge bases, experience databases, lessons learned repositories.

5. Case studies, experiences, examples of successful and unsuccessful GSD projects.

More information here.

We had guests today...

Sean O'Riain and Aphra Kerr from NUI Maynooth visited us today. They're attending an important sociology conference taking place at UL over the next three days.

Sean is part of the advisory group of our project and we're looking forward to have him back here for a whole day later this year to discuss our research.

Michael, Anders, Anne and myself had a very interesting conversation with them over lunch about topics ranging from interaction design, cultural probes, organizations trying to solve their political problems by introducing new software tools - to Twitter and information overload.

College of Informatics & Electronics Research Day

The College of Informatics and Electronics has a newly appointed assistant dean and one of his first actions was to organize a research day. All postgraduates in the college were invited to present their work and were also asked to submit a poster that could be put on display in the lobby. In his own words:

"The purpose of the Research Day is to create interaction and discussion on research with others within the College and to disseminate information on your research to the University Campus."

The event took place yesterday and Myself and Paul Gallagher from the IDC got to present our PhD work and we also had posters. Two other students from the IDC had poster too: Parag Deshpande and Darragh Murphy.

Overall it was pretty interesting to see what other people are doing in the college, even though much of the stuff is very different from what we are doing. I didn't see all of the presentations, but there were two other Lero postgraduates presenting among the ones I attended, namely Eoin Ò Conchùir (who is also into GSD research) and John Burton (who does research on medical devices).

Winner of best speech was Mìcheàl Mac Lochlainn with his talk about text-to-speech theories and techniques. Interesting topic and a very good speaker!

And, as the little cherry on top, there was free wine and snacks afterwards...

Right here and now?!

Yep, Anders! Right here and now!

After a five minute discussion about keeping track about things happening in our project, we decided to start a blog!

So here we go! May the road rise up to meet us...