Collective production of information, content, and knowledge is one of the activities that has been facilitated by the growth of communication networks and the internet. Actually, internet itself could be viewed as the result of a collective construction, and historically, collective creation has been the rule rather than the exception, specially in the case of scientific and technical knowledge. It was not until the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment era that the inventor appears as the creator of a new technology or discoverer of a scientific fact.
However, what technologies such as wiki, and its best known incarnation: wikipedia, change is the size and characteristics of the collective: now anybody can participate in the content production. And, as usual, changes come with controversies: how this impacts the quality of the content, in the particular case of wikipedia, the information?.
Jaron Lanier has coined the term digital maoism to refer to the 'appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise'. Obviously the term has a critical connotation that is elaborated in Jaron's assay and has been contested by other Yochai Blenker, Cory Doctorow or Larry Senger, one of the founders of wikipedia.
The whole controversy seems to be centered on the advantages or disadvantages of collective creation and production of content, or rather, the value that is given to the results of that collective creation, with the example of wikipedia to show the good and the bad. What I found surprising, and somehow disappointing, is that most of the arguments focus on the results rather than the process: it is true that, in many cases, the information collectively created for wikipedia does not meet the standards of a good encyclopedia or scientific paper, but it is precisely the process, discussions and negotiations that take place to create that content that can shed a lot of light on the underlying controversies. I usually find more interesting the wikipedia discussion pages than the actual entry, specially for highly disputed and controversial topics.
As part of my job, I have been trying to extend (proselytize?) the use of wiki based communication and documentation in our organization during the last few months, with, I have to admit, not an overwhelming success. I thought, and I still think, that the type of collective information sharing and the possibilities for knowledge creation and interaction that wiki provide were a perfect fit for the globally distributed environment in which we have to work.
For some reason (and I have some theories that I may discuss some day), things have not worked as I expected: although everybody praised the initiative its use is still marginal... I would consider a major success if some of the underlying controversies, technical and organizational, that we face were detected and addressed precisely in the process of collective creation, much as controversies are publicly highlighted in wikipedia. Unluckily, we are still too far to reach that point, so for the time being I'll be happy if I can increase the use of our wiki just as an information repository...
Monday, January 15, 2007
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Virtual migrations
The last few weeks have been very busy, but I have been able to spend dedicate some time Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization by A.Aneesh. The book is an interesting attempt to view the phenomenon of software development outsourcing and offshoring from a different perspective. Given my current job, I have done quite a lot of reading about these topics. All the stuff I had read so far seemed to address only two specific areas: the economic effects of the phenomenon or on the methods to implement and efficiency that can be extracted from remote development.
On the first aspect, what is the economic effect of the transfer of software development and related activities from developped countries to other geographies, the materials range from the populist and simplistic analysis (ala Lou Dobbs), to more serious and analytical, and obviously less alarmist, materials. Of course, the problem is that it is much easier to get exposed the former, specially on the generalist media. I must admit that I have had the Report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software (ACM, 2006) sitting in my desktop for the last few months and I have only been able to read the intro, while in this time I've read at least 50 different poorly researched articles about offshoring in general newspapers and TV shows (and that's without counting the Indian newspapers, where there are news every day about the topic!).
On the second area, the materials also range from the simplistic, all the howto guides that, according to their editorial reviews, pretend to have solutions for everything and end up listing a few basic rules together with some anecdotes about cultural differences, to the well researched. In this later group, I must recommend Global IT Outsourcing: software development across borders(Sahay, Nicholson and Krishna, 2005), a book that using an ethnographic aproach analyzes several cases of successful and failed offshoring projects, extracting relevant insights, but without trying to give simple recipes or solutions that should work everywhere. (If I had read this book a few months before I did, I would have been able to skip some of the mistakes I did in the beginning of the project!).
In Virtual Migrations, Aneesh tries to address the whole offshoring/outsourcing/globalization issue from a different perspective: focusing more on what is the effect on the persons and organizations that participate in the whole phenomenon. This is how he comes up with the term that gives the title to the book: he claims that the whole topic can be analyzed as a change in the work migration paradigm. Instead of moving workers, only the work result is moved.
Hence programmers in India become virtual migrants, working for the big (mostly American) corporations from their Indian location. This enables capturing the advantages of migrant workers (basically lower salaries) without having to cope with the issues of integration of immigrants into a different society. This change is happening because of the availability of new digital communication and information technologies and facilitated by a change in the organizations towards what the author calls the algocratic model, where code and software plays a key role in the organizational and work structure.
This would be an example on how technology helps shaping the social structure, but the author escapes both from the fully technological deterministic or fully social construction perspective. For him code, distributed programming and related technologies are more an actor that shapes and is shaped by other economical, social, organizational and technological factors (more like an actor-network in ANT...)
In summary, Virtual Migration is a very interesting work, both from the theoretical perspective and the ethnographic data used in the argumentation, although, from my own experience, I find some of his accounts on how easy is to work IT related work around too optimistic. He does not talk too much about the issue of knowledge migration and its difficulties and barriers.
On the first aspect, what is the economic effect of the transfer of software development and related activities from developped countries to other geographies, the materials range from the populist and simplistic analysis (ala Lou Dobbs), to more serious and analytical, and obviously less alarmist, materials. Of course, the problem is that it is much easier to get exposed the former, specially on the generalist media. I must admit that I have had the Report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software (ACM, 2006) sitting in my desktop for the last few months and I have only been able to read the intro, while in this time I've read at least 50 different poorly researched articles about offshoring in general newspapers and TV shows (and that's without counting the Indian newspapers, where there are news every day about the topic!).
On the second area, the materials also range from the simplistic, all the howto guides that, according to their editorial reviews, pretend to have solutions for everything and end up listing a few basic rules together with some anecdotes about cultural differences, to the well researched. In this later group, I must recommend Global IT Outsourcing: software development across borders(Sahay, Nicholson and Krishna, 2005), a book that using an ethnographic aproach analyzes several cases of successful and failed offshoring projects, extracting relevant insights, but without trying to give simple recipes or solutions that should work everywhere. (If I had read this book a few months before I did, I would have been able to skip some of the mistakes I did in the beginning of the project!).
In Virtual Migrations, Aneesh tries to address the whole offshoring/outsourcing/globalization issue from a different perspective: focusing more on what is the effect on the persons and organizations that participate in the whole phenomenon. This is how he comes up with the term that gives the title to the book: he claims that the whole topic can be analyzed as a change in the work migration paradigm. Instead of moving workers, only the work result is moved.
Hence programmers in India become virtual migrants, working for the big (mostly American) corporations from their Indian location. This enables capturing the advantages of migrant workers (basically lower salaries) without having to cope with the issues of integration of immigrants into a different society. This change is happening because of the availability of new digital communication and information technologies and facilitated by a change in the organizations towards what the author calls the algocratic model, where code and software plays a key role in the organizational and work structure.
This would be an example on how technology helps shaping the social structure, but the author escapes both from the fully technological deterministic or fully social construction perspective. For him code, distributed programming and related technologies are more an actor that shapes and is shaped by other economical, social, organizational and technological factors (more like an actor-network in ANT...)
In summary, Virtual Migration is a very interesting work, both from the theoretical perspective and the ethnographic data used in the argumentation, although, from my own experience, I find some of his accounts on how easy is to work IT related work around too optimistic. He does not talk too much about the issue of knowledge migration and its difficulties and barriers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)