Social Life of Information

I’m doing a lot more writing lately. In fact, much more writing than I think I had ever expected, had I ever stopped working long enough to set expectations. I’ve been a coauthor on three conference paper submissions this month, and submitted an accepted full paper as well. My classes this semester will both require much more frequent writing exercises; last semester’s weekly “missives” were only a warm-up for this semester. My organizational sociology seminar requires a weekly memo, and three short papers, while my theory construction seminar requires ad-hoc weekly writing assignments, two short theory construction papers, and a longer dissertation framework paper. I can handle this kind of ongoing, progressive writing; there are deadlines and I can plan accordingly.

What I’ve generally failed to take into account is all of the other writing, like conference papers and even just the abstracts. For those who don’t know, it’s not uncommon for long abstracts to be submitted for conference papers, which are only written upon acceptance of the abstract. This means you’re routinely writing short papers of about 1,000 - 1,500 words for submissions; when they are accepted, you scale it up to whatever the venue expects, which varies widely. Of course, this is only the case some of the time; often the full paper has to be submitted. Two of this month’s submissions were of the latter variety, but I was only first author for one of them and I’m the last author for the abstract which makes up the third submission this month. All of these papers were written with Kevin Crowston and James Howison as an outcome of my fall research practicum with the FLOSS research group.

Now we wait to see if any of them are accepted. I’m hopeful; I think they represent good and interesting work. I still have a perfect acceptance record; every paper I submitted through 2007 was accepted. This suggests two things: first, I haven’t really submitted many papers, and second, this statistic cannot possibly last!