Muireann's time with the socGSD team coming to an end...

Today was Muireann's last day with us. We enjoyed a lot having her around this summer as a STARs teacher, and in a short time she has become part of our team.

She sat in most our team meetings during this period, joined us in attending talks and presentations, gave her moral support to our OSS conference presentation and participated as an observer in our recent meeting with the advisory group. She spent time with each of us, getting acquainted with our specific research interests, career trajectories and work.

She was also given the chance to meet with some of our colleagues in Lero: Ita Richardson, Brian Fitzgerald, Irene Caulfield, Val Casey, Sadhana Deshpande.

Pamela O'Shea gave her a Linux crash course. Gabriela tried to pass her the social software bug;-)

Our colleagues in the IDC adopted her as well, and she had the chance to find out about the other ongoing projects.
We were more than happy to have Muireann here with us for the summer, and she's more than welcome to visit the IDC in the future! We hope to keep in touch with her and her school in Carrigaline in the future...

Goodbye, Muireann, and thank you!

Getting feedback on our work to date...

On Wednesday, July 17, our team had the chance to meet with our advisory group again (last meeting was in September last year).

James Wickham (from Trinity College Dublin), Seamas Kelly and Pamela Abbott (from University College Dublin) visited us for a day to discuss our research to date.

The whole team was present (Prof.Liam Bannon, Gabriela Avram, Anders Sigfridsson, Daniel Sullivan, Anne Sheehan and Michael Cooke). Muireann O'Brien, our STARs guest for the summer, joined us as well.
The morning was dedicated to presentations. Liam opened the meeting, presenting the current status of our research.

• Anne came next, speaking about her work together with Anders on positioning our own work in the landscape of Global Software Development;
• Anders spoke about our approach in studying the PyPy Open Source community using situated learning as lens; in connection with this, he commented on his intentions to focus his PhD thesis on learning in the workplace;
• Daniel made an introduction in the topic of his master thesis (Defect Tracking Systems) and presented his latest observations from recent fieldwork.
• Gabriela spoke about her field observations on collaborative work practices in GSD and the major topics she sees evolving: tools adoption, e-meetings, social networking in the corporate environment.

The ideas in each presentation were commented in detail both by our guests and by the other participants.

The afternoon was dedicated to discussing the current stage of our research and the future plans.

We all found the discussions extremely useful for our work. It was a real work meeting, in which we put into light both the strengths and the weaknesses we could see in our work and got useful feedback from the members of the advisory group (and Liam!). They confirmed the value of our approach and encouraged us to continue on the same lines.

IBM innovation Centre opening July 11th 2007 at Damastown

Daniel attended this recent IBM event and is sharing his notes here:

As was previously announced by the former future leader of the main party in government and minister for Enterprise IBM have this past week opened what they describe as an Innovation Centre. It is very nice facility in part of building 6

I missed the introduction from Hans Ulrich Maerkl, Chairman of IBM EMEA as I had some other matters to attend to.

I came in just as the talk from Jim Corgel was hitting its stride it was primarily aimed at Venture Capitalists and companies that are thinking of partnering with IBM and he spoke of the ongoing roll out of Innovation centres or similar type facilities around Europe and he also spoke of the types of virtual supports that there will be.

Next up, we saw a video from Porto Media which was quite twee (as the owner himself admitted but the idea is very good - essentially you can download media such as movies in less than 20 secs to a USB stick from a Kiosk that can be placed anywhere. The kiosk takes up a sq metre of floor space and compared to say Blockbuster which has 8/900 moives per store, this device can have 4/5,000 movies. After the video we heard from the company’s owner Chris Armstrong who spoke about the problems of being taken seriously by the Venture Capital community in Ireland.

Next was BiancaMed, who are in the medical devices area. This may perhaps be more interesting from an wider IDC perspective. They is involved in proactive, non invasive monitoring of sleep, diet and exercise as part of its efforts in enhancing well-being. (I know it sounds a little too like a line from Lenina Husley in Demolition Man- " Enhance your calm, John Spartan") That said, I'd be curious about the technology, they use audio that gets analysed to monitor heart rate breathing and so on.

Next, Deborah Magid from IBM then spoke more about what IBM gives for Partner organisations. This presentation was a bit more buzzwordy. I'm pretty sure I heard synergy being used at least once. That said, IBM are really pushing that they are interested in partnering with companies and that they are interested in VCs funding some of those companies.

We broke for coffee at this point and there was some mingling.

Sandra Kearney - spoke at length about Web 2.0 and how Internet 3D is what IBM believes is the next stage in the web. She uses it herself to manage her teams who are distributed across Australia, the US and SE Asia. A ex-military person and pilot with 1500 hours flight time, I recall she mentioned 130s so I'm guess it was C130s.

Msoft spoke about how they use 2nd life for demoing what their product is all about. Their product is for tracking blood product in a hospital/clinical environment.

Nic Brisbourne spoke again about the VC environment and the opportunities involved. Only tangential about virtual worlds and 3D internet. If you click the link on his name you can read his perspective on the opening.

Ham Rambler or John Mahon (who is a pilot) spoke about Dublin in 2nd Life which he created and how that has been going. Talked about audio streaming and live music being played within 2nd life and how money can be made by the players of the music.

Then we had lunch - sandwiches on the go - and a tour of the new area. I spoke with Alexander Troussov about their work on Galaxy, it is quite intriguing and also the Lotus Connections work is interesting. Overall there was a pretty heavy business emphasis to the day and a considerable media in attendance. There were well over 200 people in all.

Checking notes with an Indian software developer:-)

Today, Gabriela and Muireann had Sadhana Deshpande as guest in the IDC, a wonderful opportunity to discuss about cultural differences, entrepreneurship and gender in software development.

Sadhana recently joined Ita Richardson's research group as a research assistant, and we also explored possible collaboration directions together. She, together with her younger sister, started a software development company in India in the 90's and her portfolio includes some very important projects undertaken for the local government.

Gabriela brought into discussion some of the assertions encountered in interviews and publications regarding the collaboration with Indian software engineers, and it was extremely interesting to hear that things are not what they seem to be when we look at them through the lenses of Western culture!
Just a few examples:

• Female Indian managers don't use their first names on business cards not because they are women, but because it's impolite to address any superior there on the first name!!
• Indians are very adaptive when it comes to learning a foreign language other than English; they do this naturally, as India is a huge country and there are lots of languages spoken only in specific regions.
• Indian developers who spent time working abroad are not rejected by their teams when returning to India; on the contrary, this is considered the norm - people should spend time abroad in order to refine their education and get acquainted to different cultures;
• The high turnover in software development personnel the big multinational companies complain about is part of the Indian software development culture; changing jobs every 1-2 years is a way of advancing in their careers and learning about different technologies. This trend is manifested only in software development and associated industries.

Lero Talk: (Bad) Software and the Law

Today, we(Anne, Daniel, Muireann and Gabriela) went to an interesting talk given by Professor Cem Kaner (Director of the Centre for Software Testing Education and Research at Florida Institute of Technology). He seems to be deeply involved in the development of the U.S. law on software. He also writes a blog, and has co-authored three books:

• Testing Computer Software;
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-driven Approach; and
• Bad Software: What To Do When Software Fails.

The main topic revolved around the consequences of delivering software that fails to perform as reasonably expected. Are software developers accountable to software customers? What if bad software actually kills people or causes nasty accidents?

He spoke about risks, material effects, the American attitude toward know-how and reverse engineering, he emphasized we can't be aware of all the emerging properties of software and he stated that most of the software problems are actually design defects.

Professor David Parnas, who acted as discussant, argued that software should not be in any law, and engineering laws should apply to software. From his perspective, complexity isn't just out there, it is something we humans create, and it shouldn't be an excuse for sloppiness.

An interesting idea that arose in the discussion was that, at some point, people become tied into using software, either because their data is in, and they are dependent on it, or - my insight- because their practices are heavily reliant on the tool, and they can't even imagine another way of performing a specific activity than the one they are familiar with.

Talk by Peter Eades

Muireann attended a talk by Peter Eades, University of Sydney, HxI Initiative and NICTA, in the ERB last week. The title of the talk was "Humans Interacting with Information, Machines, Systems, and Humans".

In this talk some technologies that support humans in their interactions with information, machines, systems, and other humans were discussed. The talk began with Information Visualization, that is, the art and science of mapping abstract data into visual forms. These visual forms enable humans to understand large data sets (such as social networks, and biological networks). Professor Eades gave some interesting new and old examples, which show the successes and failures of computer-based Information Visualization, including metro maps from around the world.
The 'Braccetto' project, which investigates how distributed teams of humans can collaborate over a shared visual workspace was also described. The 'Braccetto' project is developing "mixed presence groupware", that is, tools to enable partially co-located and partially remote teams to collaborate. The talk on the Braccetto project, which began in 2006, was interesting. The idea of a CTW (Configurable Tele-presence Workstation) is being explored. When collaborating, there are two screens and both teams can observe a vertical one, while running an application on the horizontal one. This system is also touch-screen.

Finally the 'HxI Initiative' was described briefly. This is a major initiative of the Australian Government that aims to increase Australia's research output in HxI.
Here's a presentation on the same topic that was available on the web.

EACE Workshop at Fraunhofer FOKUS

Gabriela:
This draft has been sitting here for more than a month... Trying to finish & publish it now!



On June 22 early in the morning I flew to Berlin to attend the EACE Workshop at Fraunhofer FOKUS, after a demanding week spent in Dublin doing fieldwork.
The EACE project is part of the ongoing research in Europe looking at ICT technologies for developing new collaborative tools and environments. The EACE project is an 18 month FP6 Specific Support Action set to "investigate further the dynamics, potential and impacts of the technological advances in order to feed the policy making process".

The agenda sounded very interesting, and I was hoping to meet some of the people doing research in the field of Collaborative (e)Working Environments, which ties so well into our work. I'm part of several AMI@work communities, I'm subscribed to the ECOSPACE newsletter, but I didn't have yet the chance to meet face-to-face with people doing research in this area, and I thought this would be a good opportunity.

As usually when I travel abroad, I did my homework before(booked the flight, arranged accommodation at friends, printed out directions and a map). Unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn website knew nothing about Kaiserin-Augusta Allee, and gave me directions to Kaiserin-Augusta Strasse instead. I had to arrive there before realising there was no Fraunhofer Institut in that area, and it took me a while to get to the right place, so I missed some of the morning talks.

Craig Cmehill from SAP has blogged the event on the spot (and then waited indefinitely for this post to be published, guessing - I don't know how!- that there was another blogger in the room!).

In the afternoon, Arnd Layer from IBM Germany spoke about Practical experience with social software at IBM. He spoke about profiles, communities, tagging, internal blogs and activities - all what Lotus Connections basically offers!, but he illustrated everything with examples, which made the talk really interesting. I really loved this particular tag cloud!

After spending the whole week absorbing information in my fieldwork, I was on the same wavelength with the speaker. When Craig asked: "Is this public? Can I blog this?", I basically couldn't keep from telling him it was on YouTube:-) as public as it can get!
Arnd also mentioned Lotus Greenhouse, meant to give customers and collaborators the feeling of the new products, and ThinkPlace, the internal Web application for facilitating innovation.

Arnd concluded with a few words of wisdom on Business Social Networking:
- listen to your customers;
- use blogs to communicate externally, watch blogs speaking about your own products;
- encourage adoption: instant messaging and web conferences can provide people with real time information;
- use wikis as glossaries for teams / FAQs.

He emphasized that we live in a globalised world, in which the ones who dare and are pro-active will have the advantages. Knowledge Management was - for too long- stuck in top down processes; social networking opens new perspectives.

The next speaker was Craig Cmehil, Community Evangelist at SAP AG - presenting The world(s) of the SAP community Network. This time, the facts were completely new, and I had a tremendous surprise to see what a big company can do with these nice tools, if the right attitude and culture are embraced. And of course, the right people - Craig appeared to me as a sort of wizard, open-minded, innovative and ready to try new things in new ways, always present in a hundred places at one time, reading, commenting, adjusting the tools to fit the people.
The SAP community network seems to me an impressive achievement, with separate areas dedicated to developers and business process experts.
What makes the concept interesting are its exclusive content, the downloads available, the worldwide collaboration it fosters and a recognition system for the contributions of its members.
Craig said 76% of the content was actually contributed by the users, which is quite impressive.
He also mentioned specific problems, like French speakers not mingling with the others and having their separate community - but the community network is actually supporting this.
New tools are offered to the community and people are experimenting. Some get adopted, some others don't. He mentioned Second Life and Twitter (and the case of Sen. Edwards that made the corporate world to actually pay attention to micro-blogging!)

The next presenter was Volkmar Pipek from University of Siegen, Germany. His talk was titled Every Software is Social -Appropriation Support in Collaborative Systems.
He tackled one of my favourite topics: the adoption of collaborative software tools, mentioning long-term studies on Groupware adoption such as Orlikowski 1996, Kasten & Jones 1998, Pipek & Wulf 1999.

I loved the idea that good design and user centred software development are important, but they don't guarantee adoption; use dynamics can‘t be fully anticipated.
I particularly liked the statement on the role of social practice around collaborative systems
in adoption. Actually the practice is the appropriation of these technologies!!

He illustrated his talk with a few examples from their work - the help function of a tool(an Eclipse-based client for the BSCW system) was combined with a wiki.

The main conclusion was that these ‘appropriation activities’ should be actively supported, and we're moving towards ‘Virtual Communities of Tool Practice’! The designers of a tool can do a lot, but the last mile has to be done by users.

Frank Fuchs Kittowski from Fraunhofer ISST was next, speaking about Integration of Knowledge Communities into Knowledge-intensive Business Processes.

I came across Frank's name while I was working for Fraunhofer IESE and some of my colleagues were involved in a project called APO-IT together with several other Fraunhofer Institutes, but I never had the chance to meet him in person before.

He spoke about making informal collaboration visible and integrating communities into business processes. Wikis were then brought into the picture for providing "context- (process-) based access to the community" and give birth to "collaborative knowledge activities without process
boundaries (in and across process steps)". I must confess I am a bit skeptical about this idea. It might sound good in theory (finding a cure for a pain we all know it's there!), but it doesn't pay any attention to the fact that communities are living organisms (if we speak about real communities here and not about special interest groups assembled by the management!)

Their approach is actually adding a wiki and a wiki interface to the existing APO Pilot process oriented knowledge base.

The interesting twist is that the application is designed for process integrated learning in the automotive industry.

The last speaker was George Milis, from European Dynamics who presented the current results of the EACE project in a talk titled: Towards a New Policy Framework for the Adoption of Electronic Collaborative Working Environments.
The project partners set to elaborate policy recommendations for CWE adoption(Collaborative eWorking Environments) in the EU.

What they came up with was a "layered ontology of collaboration patterns". More on the framework and the 3 selected CWE prototypes in George's slides!

There were mentions about counterbalancing the American supremacy in designing collaborative software tools (doh!). Someone mentioned the Buerger Portal initiative in Germany - giving every german citizen an email address, a web page, access to shared spaces (who's interested already has all these).
Someone asked the following question: "If the availability of the technologies is not a problem, then how can EU stimulate the adoption?" I tried to bring into discussion the idea the approach shouldn't be centred on the technology and the collaborative tools, but on the purpose for which one would embrace these tools. If a job application procedure or a tax claim can only be done online, people will learn how to use it. But putting the carriage in front of the horses won't help!
I mentioned Karin Knorr-Cetina's work on Sociality with Objects that has been used by Jyri Engestrom to show why some social network services work and others don't.

Another discussion topic was the (disappearing) work-life balance. People tend to take care of personal matters durring the working hours and work from home in the evenings, so the boundaries between work and free time tend to get blurred. Arnd stated that what's happening inside IBM shows that actually adding a social dimension to work improves productivity.
Volkmar argued that life needs structure -say the psychologists!

The question: Do we need a collaboration etiquette(c-etiquette)? was also asked. Could such an etiquette be modelled ? (In my opinion, it can only emerge!)

The opportunity of using CWE as a vehicle for transferring knowledge and skills to new and younger employees was also touched in the discussion.

The slides of the presentations were made available for download, and there are also a few pictures from the event available.

Together with Craig Cmehil, we managed to ignite some interest for social software tools and especially for Twitter and Dopplr! Unfortunately, the enthusiasm was short lived - none of the invitations I've sent were ever answered!

Craig also uses a nice tool I wasn't aware of - Time-to-Meet - for scheduling his meetings.
There's a link to a database full of other fancy applications on his blog.

In conclusion, it was an interesting event and a good networking opportunity, but my original expectation of getting associated with some FP7 proposal writers in this area wasn't unfortunately met.

My fieldwork coming to a natural closure

The team I have observed for 16 months is handing over their project to another team in Europe. The joys of global distribution of software development:-)

So, my time with them has come to a natural closure. And in a way, I'm glad it happened like this - it was so difficult to make up my mind about when to stop!

The team is staying together and will be assigned another project, and I think this was a very wise decision. It takes about 6 months for a newbie to come to full speed (maybe less if he's only changing projects inside the same business unit!). There's so much to learn, not necessarily about coding, but also about people, tools, internal processes and procedures...

If I give it a thought, only 6 of the members we met in the beginning of our study are still part of the team. Probably 9-10 left, joining other projects, sometimes leaving the company, some other times the country... That's life! People are not spending 20 years of their lives in the same job anymore - they're moving, learning, adapting, and I don't think this is bad. It keeps you alive!

As a former software developer, there were times when I felt I got too close to my "subjects", becoming involved in their activities (at least emotionally;-) . Ethnographers call this "going native"!

But now that the circle is closed, and I'll have to move on and do the writing... the most challenging part!

Lero Talk on AUTOSAR

On Wednesday, before our presentation at the OSS 07 conference, Gabriela and Muireann attended a Lero talk given by Uwe Werner from Bosch on "AUTOSAR – Automotive Open System Architecture: Challenges and Opportunities".

AUTOSAR is an open standards organization created to provide open standards for the architecture of the software created for the automotive industry. It brings together an impressive number of major car manufacturers, but also providers of various car parts and research organisations.

Open Source Software Conference at UL

The 3rd International Conference on Open Source Systems is hosted by our University between 11 and 14 July.

As stated by the organisers, "the goal of OSS 2007 is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public administration can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also meant to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer."

On Wednesday 13 July, our paper "Sprint-driven development: working, learning and the process of enculturation in the PyPy community"(Sigfridsson, Avram, Sheehan, Sullivan) was scheduled in a very select company:

• part of Prof. Kevin Crowston's team at Syracuse University, Qing Li presented the paper "Emergent Decision-making Practices in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Development Teams" (Heckman, Crowston, Eseryel, Allen, Li);
• Ari Jaaksi from Nokia presented his paper "Experiences on product development with open source", after giving an excellent keynote in the morning.

Last year in August, the PyPy project organised a sprint at UL. It was a madly busy period, but Anders, Daniel and myself decided to take the opportunity to observe the sprint. We spent part of that week in August trying to make ourselves useful to the team, talking to them, watching their interaction, recording their work sessions. They were so used to being studied, that they graciously allowed us to sit in and listen.



Early in January, we decided to put in a paper for the OSS 07 conference. The paper was accepted and this is how we got to participate.






Two other papers, presented in the afternoon, were also well connected to our topic:

• "Learning through practical involvement in the OSS ecosystem: experiences from a Masters assignment "( Lundell, Persson, Lings -University of Skövde, Sweden), presented by Bjorn Lundell;
  
• "Learning and the Imperative of Production in F/OS development"- presented by Evangelia Berdou (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK).

STARs participant joined our project team...

Muireann O'Brien, teacher at the Carrigaline Community School, joined our project team for the following 8 weeks.

She is funded through the SFI STARs programme:

The STARS programme is an initiative through which teachers can receive support to conduct research within an SFI-funded research team during school holiday periods for a period of between 6 to 8 weeks. Teachers receive a stipend equivalent of up to 8 weeks salary for their participation in the programme. The goal is to help teachers renew their interest in science as researchers, connect them with faculty in the universities and institutes of technology and enhance the teaching of science across the educational system. The primary aim of the programme is to disseminate new skills and knowledge to teachers which can then be passed on to their students.

Muireann will be involved in all our project activities during her stay with us. After an induction period that will give her the chance to become familiar both with the Global Software Development literature and with the particular approach of our project, we are going to involve her in most of our activities. She will also be given the chance to participate in workshops and meetings with other research groups studying Global Software Development from different perspectives, in order to get a more complete picture of research being under way in this area.

Having Muireann on board this summer will allow us to get a better image of the students' level of understanding and enable her to explain our research to her peers and students.

Software Process Measurement

Anne attended this talk on Software Metrics at Lero today.

The speaker was Jari Soini from Tampere University of Technology in Finland. He is in the process of writing up his PhD and because of his interest in Software Process, has connections with Ita Richardson, hence his visit to Lero.

Jari is part of a research group whose aim is to provide a metrics database to assist SMEs in Finland define measurement objectives, i.e. what can and should be measured in the software development process. Knowledge sharing is a key motivator in designing the database. The SMEs are finding measurement difficult and want to learn from each other. Metrics have been gathered from over 40 companies through a combination of interviews and a detailed questionnaire. The metrics database has a web based interface which is designed by the research team with continuous feedback and evaluation from the user group.

There was interesting discussion around potential bias in the evaluation of metrics to be included in the database. The research group doesn't identify who decides within each SME what should be measured; who completes the questionaire; who judges questionaire categories such as reliability &accuracy; who are the users of the system.

As part of the data gathering process 3 categories of beneficiary are identified: upper management; project management; & software engineers. One of the outcomes of the research was that the primary beneficiaries of the metrics are upper management (82%), with only 7% aimed at software engineers as key beneficiaries, despite the fact that software engineers are tasked with collecting most of the measurements. Work has not been done in this project on the actual or perceived impact on software engineers.

Abstracts relating to the topics that were discussed can be found on the Lero website.

Educamp at Tipperary Institute of Technology

Even if both Michael and Gabriela had the intention to attend the Educamp at the Tipperary Institute of Technology in Thurles yesterday, in the end, Muireann had to go on her own. Having read the announcement and listening to Gabriela's explanations on Barcamps and Unconferences, Muireann had the impression that she would end up at a very unorthodox event. It wasn't quite like that ;-). Here's a press article related to the event.

The event was organised as a formal conference "The Internet Experience in Education", with a number of speakers in the morning session and organised workshops in the afternoon. The speakers included Dr. Rachel O'Connell, Bebo, Bernie Goldbach, Social Media in Education, Simon Grehan, Irish Children's use of Social Networks, Dr. Deirdre Butler, Innovative Teaching and Seamus Ryan on Whole School Information Technology. A number of teachers spoke on innovative teaching using technology in the classroom including Ronan Ward, who won an Innovative Teachers Award at the EMEA Innovative Teachers forum in Paris this year.

Muireann found the whole experience very refreshing and was particularly interested in the area of Social Networking as the general feeling was that rather than fight this phenomenon, which has always been the case up to now, teachers will have to learn more about it and try to develop ways to turn it into something more positive. It will be important to educate students (and teachers!) on how to use this media safely, to enhance the experience in the classroom.
Workshops in the afternoon included Audio and Video in the Classroom (using Podcasts etc), Internet Safety, and another gave tips on using OpenSource Software in schools.

Each participant received a USB memory stick with all presentations and useful information. This will be a valuable resource when introducing the ideas to the classroom. Muireann came away from the conference with great enthusiasm and felt the large attendance illustrated the willingness of teachers to embrace innovation and creativity through technology.

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...