I’m not sure where I stand on social media these days (as I write this in a blog post…) I didn’t adopt the first social media apps and sites particularly early, but I signed on to quite a few during my stint at SI. Since then, my attention has become even more precious, and I’m much slower to join one more SNS unless there’s a really good reason. For my personal use, a social media service has to be directly useful to me in some fashion, and that’s in addition to whatever social network functionality it might offer. LinkedIn and Facebook (ever more similar these days) provide informal contact management, Walker Tracker lets me track daily step counts, del.icio.us helps me ‘remember’ web sites, Twitter allows me to chatter with some friends, MyExperiment lets me share research workflows much like SlideShare allows sharing of presentation slides, Ravelry assists with organizing and documenting my knitting, and Flickr - well, I shouldn’t have to explain that.

Maintaining a presence in all these spaces takes some time and effort. Lately, the time and effort that I can invest is generally pretty minimal. I still spend most of my social media “face time” with Twitter and Flickr, but I just don’t have much energy or inclination to invest a lot of effort in Facebook, for example. What I’ve noticed over the last year is that most of my online social networks mirrored my offline social networks - until I moved away from Michigan.

Since leaving my home state, I’ve found that a lot more of my socializing is both provided and constrained by online social media. I think there are two underlying reasons for this; Ann Arbor is a hotbed of social media adopters (true story!) and I just don’t have much of an offline social network in Syracuse. Maintaining contact with friends through social media certainly eased the transition to a new community, as I was never completely socially isolated. After a year here, I’m just starting to have a few local contacts unrelated to the iSchool, and they are mostly people I’ve met through Ravelry. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that outside of school, most of my social contact occurs through the Internet, but as a PhD student, I just don’t have a lot of time to go out and build my local social network. The motivation is also missing; while I’ll be in Syracuse for another 3 or 4 years, there is a definite plan for departure, which amounts to disincentive to developing roots here.

I’m glad to have social media as a way to maintain contact with distant friends and relatives, but it doesn’t really replace face-to-face interaction. Being far away from most of the people I love makes that all the more apparent, and yet we keep in far better contact through the social media than we ever would have through other means. The role that social media plays in my life has shifted over the last three years, since I first started using del.icio.us; I find that today I am slower to adopt new social media, but a steadfast user of those which meet my needs, social or otherwise.

I just returned from Manchester, where I attended the 4th International Conference on eSocial Science. It was a great conference; I have lots of ideas and learned of many new resources, and Manchester was an interesting place to visit for a few days. I was impressed by the big English breakfasts, and although my sightseeing was quite limited, I had fun and even remembered to take a few photos. As always, I wish I could have taken Everett along with me, but he only gets so much paid time off, and traveling is now part of my job…

Next month I’m going over to Oxford for just one day, to participate in an invited workshop on profiling communities, hosted by OSS Watch, an organization that serves as an advisory for open source software use in higher education in the UK. I’m giving a talk on the use of eScience workflow analysis tools to research communication dynamics in FLOSS projects. It seems absurd to spend so little time on the ground for all the time in the air, but at least I’ll gain some glancing familiarity with Oxford for the trip in September.

The school year will start in late August, so these two trips will comprise most of my summer travel. I already have another 2 or 3 trips lined up for the fall semester, but that’s hardly vacation time. In the meantime, we’re trying to do a little regional tourism as well. Since we don’t commute for work, fuel costs don’t hurt us so badly and we can make the occasional expenditure for gas to go on a day trip.

Last weekend, we went down to Corning to see the Corning Museum of Glass. It was pretty neat, a combination of part art museum devoted to a medium (glass, of course) and part science museum devoted to the description of the science of production and use of glass. I liked the display on optics but wish they’d used more technical terminology - not that most people are that interested in optics, but it was really useful for me to look at cross-sections of lenses. On our return from the CMOG, we stopped at the famous Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca and had fried tofu with chick pea salsa and polenta-stuffed peppers for dinner, with a ginger peach parfait for dessert. For the 4 hours we spent driving throughout the day, the weather was absolutely perfect, and we enjoyed watching the rolling low mountains of the Finger Lakes region slide by the car windows.

It’s been awhile since my last post, but constantly doing a catch-up on my life seems pretty dull, so instead I’ve queued up a few different topics for blog posts. I’m starting with my new favorite social media site, Ravelry, which is an online community for knitters and crocheters. What I love most about Ravelry is its design, which links together various online personal catalogs (for needles, “stash” yarn, books, and patterns) in a way that assists users, much like a hypermedia version of the now old-fashioned craft notebook that serious knitters would keep to record details about projects, patterns, and yarns.

Ravelry has the typical social network site user profile, but also a number of other tools, and the interaction paradigm learned much from the best of Web 2.0 and makes good use of the modern database and rich media elements available. Like Flickr, Ravelry has discussion threads, forums, groups, friends, favorites, commenting and user-to-user messaging. Stashed yarns and projects can be shared with groups, and there are groups of every flavor: swaps, knit-alongs, TV show afficionados, interest or location-based, and so on. Taking it up a notch, Ravelry also offers reputation management indicators (number of posts for a users, how many posts in a thread, etc.) and voting on posts with a variety of options: educational, interesting, funny, agree, disagree, and love.

Better yet are the audience-specific online catalogs and interlinking between them. Users can “stash” yarns they own with a wide variety of metadata, and can rate the yarns. Likewise, they can “queue” patterns in the order they’d like to make projects, including a metadata section that easily transforms the queued pattern into a “cast on” project. The project object again provides handy ways to record a variety of metadata about the project, and users can import blog posts related to the project as well as Flickr (and other photo sites) photos of their project. Each user also has a spot to catalog needles and hooks, with a widget to print off a little chart of the tools one already owns before going off to the store and buying yet another set of size 6 29″ circular needles . The stashed yarns can be linked to the projects for which they were used, and patterns are linked to the yarns that Ravelers have used to make the pattern. Users rate the patterns themselves by difficulty and “star” style rating to capture overall appeal, and the patterns also link to blog posts, projects, comments, and source details.

In short, everything is linked up as though there’s a nice tight ontology running behind excellent interface design and thoughtful feature implementation. Besides the amazing and extraordinarily useful functionality, the interfaces are easy to learn and provide a lot of drag-and-drop interactions. The interlinking of all of the craft-specific objects is what really makes it outstanding; it alleviates the effort required to organize knitting efforts by helping me keep track (simultaneously) of my materials, tools, finished objects, and future projects.

I have no doubt that I have gotten a lot more knitting projects finished in recent history as a result of using Ravelry; if nothing else, it reduces the downtime between projects because it’s so much easier to figure out what’s next.

And then there’s the community part. Like Flickr, Ravelry provides a way for people to meet over a common interest, with boundary objects such as projects and group membership to allow opportunities for trust to develop before meeting in person. Generally speaking, however, it seems most knitters and crocheters are friendly people, so I’ve seen little reluctance to meet up. I’ve gone to a few local Ravelry meetups, most recently this morning for World Wide Knit In Public Day. Four of us met up at the CNY Regional Market and knitted at a picnic table; other local Ravelers did their public knitting in alternate locations, tailgating in a yarn store parking lot and gathering at the Carousel Center mall. Most members of the CNY Raveling Knitters & Crocheters group did not know each other before Ravelry, and now there are weekly Saturday morning meetups at a local Freedom of Espresso coffee shop in Franklin Square, with a monthly “big” meetup for which some members will travel from outlying communities.

I’m not as involved in Ravelry as I would be if I weren’t more involved in grad school. Nonetheless, it has provided me a really useful service in the site functionality alone, and the opportunity to meet other people in the area with a similar interest. From an HCI perspective, I am constantly delighted by the great site functionality and ease of use; Casey and Matt (the site founders) have really created something special. Oh, and Bob (Casey and Matt’s funny-looking dog) is probably the coolest social media site mascot ever.

But it doesn’t really imply a break. I’ll be continuing service on the faculty search committee over the summer and likely into the next school year; there is plenty of work involved and we’ve just gotten started with the search. I’ll also be continuing to work with my advisor on projects related to developing FLOSS research infrastructure, and I’ve volunteered to help out with grant writing on top of that.

I’ll start up a couple of summer projects pretty soon, too - wouldn’t want to get bored without classes to swallow up my time. I’m determined to paint my drab living room a cheery green, and turn my thesis into a journal article submission. Another venture will be working on syllabus and course development with Derrick Cogburn for a new course on distributed collaboration technologies. In June, I’ll be visiting Manchester, UK for the eSocial Science conference as well; I’m really looking forward to it and feeling pretty lucky that I get to go.

New experiences for the fall are already lining themselves up. I’m eagerly anticipating a course on research design because I’m basically a methods geek at heart. I’ve also registered for a seminar on Organizational Behavior at the Whitman School of Management, which will complement the organizational sociology seminar from this semester. And I’ll have a new job, this time administering an NSF grant focused on research and design of a new curriculum for cyberinfrastructure information professionals in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines. It should be an interesting experience, it’s research-oriented, and will help me develop pedagogical skills beyond classroom teaching.

I have to blog about Ravelry.com soon, because it’s just that awesome. By helping me organize my patterns and yarn, I think it’s helping me be a more productive knitter! I’ve been doing a lot of knitting this winter because it helps me relax and focus; since the start of the school year, I’ve made a couple of scarves, a neckwarmer, and a couple of hats and headwarmers. I just finished up a sweet little silk organza ribbon yarn scarf made from special yarn I bought in Florence. I’m also making great progress on a cardigan for Everett, who is enjoying the attention involved in having a custom handmade garment created to fit him better than any other sweater he’s ever had.

The semester is nearly over, but I still have a paper to finish and a practicum to wrap up. The paper is a big theory construction paper that I dread, but at least I have a plan for using a case study theory construction method to inductively form a theory about why some open source software development projects are successful. Fortunately, I can leverage a bit of work on a review paper from my research group and the prior papers I wrote this semester to generate this paper much more efficiently than the last few. All the more fortunately because I had a momentary lapse of reason and volunteered for the faculty search committee; I think it will be a valuable experience on the overall, but the additional work for committee service is immediate and not insignificant.

Life is good, but very busy just now. After the semester ends, I will have a couple of weeks off to try to recover from the school year before diving into summer work. I’m really looking forward to it; I haven’t had two weeks in a row off in years and years. I have all manner of grand plans, and I’m sure I can get at least half of them accomplished.

I’ll be kicking it, though. It’s now less than two weeks until we depart for Florence for CHI 2008. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends in the Human-Computer Interaction community, and spending the frantic week enjoying being the photographer once again. It’s interesting to observe how the role has formalized over the last few years, as I’m coming up on my third go-round as the CHI staff photographer. I expect it will be another fun and exhausting conference, but I dread the consequences of taking 10 days out for travel. After that, the rest of the semester will be devoted to catching up and wrapping up. So will end a semester in which I have yet to feel that I have caught my stride, due to all the interruptions from travel. I’m not complaining, just observing, as I wouldn’t trade the opportunities for anything.

Speaking of opportunities, my fingers are crossed on a submission for the eResearch conference at the Oxford Internet Institute in September, and the eSocial Science conference submission that we should be hearing about any time now. The two papers that were submitted to the Fourth International Conference on Open Source Systems were both accepted, and the one for which I’m first author received very complimentary reviews. I’ll be going to Milan in the fall to present one (or possibly both) of them, so that should make an auspicious start to the next school year.

Before that, however, I still have to survive this semester and the intervening summer. This semester still has five papers, three presentations, and a handful of smaller writing assignments remaining. Fortunately, the writing has been interesting for me, and I’m working on trying a handful of different writing strategies to improve my flexibility, process, and product. Somehow, it all works out.

I heard through the grapevine that my paper was mentioned in a couple of other sessions, and I had some great discussions about the research with other members of the community over the course of the conference. It was also really great to see some friends from Michigan - I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Lada, Libby, Sean, and a number of other people from SI. All in all, it was a really fantastic conference experience for me.

At least, it was up until I got back in to Syracuse - the airport is understaffed and it took 2 hours for the baggage to be unloaded. Although my bag was a carry-on, it was gate checked because the planes are so small that an ordinary carry-on doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment, and this time they unloaded gate-checked bags with the rest of the checked bags. Except that the last bags on, which were the first bags off, were also the last ones returned. So all the complaints I’ve been hearing about United seem to be well founded, and I’ll be avoiding them in the future. Getting in at midnight and having to wait until 2 AM before my carry-on bag was returned made me a rather unhappy customer.

That aside, everything has been going very well for me lately, for which good fortune I am truly thankful. Of course, all of that is due in no small part to plenty of effort on my end. I had a really good annual review just before the iConference, and the main thing I need to work on over the next year is writing, which is difficult at times but seems to be getting better lately. It’s a little intimidating to go up for review before 8 professors, but they were quite gentle and I got a lot of good tips for writing.

I also got news that I have a summer job as a research assistant working on some FLOSS project efforts, which is really great because it’s exactly what I would best like to be doing with my summer. I’ll be working on data management and analysis workflow development to support some of the research efforts on decision making and group maintenance, and will doubtless be working on some grantwriting as well. I’m very well motivated to lend a hand with grantwriting as I’d rather get my support from grant-funded research than general funds next year.

Weick is credited with the concept of the enacted environment, as discussed by Pfeffer & Salancik, who seemed to define the environment as that which the organization knows it to be, which is to say that whatever the organization is not aware of, is not a part of its environment. Only the reality as known by the organization can be acted upon, even if that reality is not a very good representation of the environment. I find this perspective intriguing and also somewhat paradoxical; it implies an external subjective reality that can only be partially known by the organization, and that the portion that is known by the organization is its environment, which is socially constructed and subjective. This must be the main point of differentiation in the discussion of the enacted environment, as opposed to any other sort, is the enacted environment seems to be socially constructed, which would imply that non-enacted environments exist, and are not socially constructed. At the same time, I expected that the concept of an enacted environment might come closer to the idea of co-evolution of the organization and the environment, but from my reading, this does not really seem to be the case. Enactment puts control almost entirely in human hands.

Just to be picky, I would also flatly refute the assertion from Pfeffer & Salancik that “information is not neutral.” Information IS neutral. The perception and use of information is not neutral. The information itself does not take sides, though it may present a non-neutral perspective, which should instead be attributed the source of information.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Gerald Salanick, “The enactment process,” in The External Control of Organizations, 71-78. Harper & Row.
Weick, Karl, 1995. “The nature of sensemaking,” in Sensemaking in Organizations 1-16 Sage.

The workshop experience was new for me; a handful of invited participants made presentations and the discussion of their content formed the base of the program, unlike many workshops which are based on presentations of position papers or work in progress. I presented a couple of slides demonstrating the use of Taverna Workbench to replicate prior research that uses the FLOSSmole data repository. After a day and a half of “think tank” discussions, many participants had to fly home, but a few of us stayed an extra evening (due flight schedules, among other things) and we put together a draft outline of the workshop report for the funding agency. Developing the workshop report was probably the best part for me - it gave a nice summary and review of everything that had transpired, with intense discussion among the few of us who remained. We wrote it collaboratively, sharing a document with Google Docs, so even though I didn’t really say much, I was able to contribute “legitimate peripheral participation” in the form of writing. The workshop web site was another such case; it was designed for collaborative content contribution, and I posted some of my notes for posterity. So instead of blogging here about the content of the workshop, it was blogged on the workshop site.

One thing that was notable to me is how overwhelmingly male-dominated this area is. This is not just because computer science is underpopulated by women, but the gender disparity is apparently even more extreme in FLOSS development and research. The evidence at this workshop was the attendance of just two women in a group of 20 participants - only 10% - which I found slightly mystifying, given the nearly equal gender balance on the SU FLOSS research team. In fact, I think we have more women than men in the FLOSS group right now. However, a key detail is that I’m the only “data geek” among them (like the other female workshop participant, who’s into data mining) and this might be true for the broader population. It doesn’t put me off; if anything, a gender imbalance in this regard indicates good opportunities for people like me. But I do wonder why it is so…

I’m not sure why the virtual versus actual nature of resources matters so much to Sewell. Part of the challenge in interpreting Sewell’s intention in discussing the “virtual” aspects of structure is that he does not directly define “virtual” to clarify his perspective but rather refers to the literature and Giddens’ assertion of existence of structure outside of space and time. Sewell’s redefinition of rules and resources as virtual schemas and actual resources leaves me wondering which of these constitutes information, or whether both do.

Sewell’s discussion of the polysemy of resources refers several times to “an array of resources” that is interpreted or reinterpreted, and the language suggests that the word “information” is a suitable substitute for “array of resources.” This would lead me to restate the definition of agency as the actor’s ability to use information in context, and structure as the information and culture that influence social action and tend to be reproduced by social action. Perhaps this is a bit simplistic, but it is an interpretation that helps me think about the theory in terms that are meaningful to me.

Sewell, William 1992 “A theory of structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation”, American Journal of Sociology, 98: 1-29
Giddens, Anthony. 1979. “Agency Structure”, in Central Problems in Social Theory, 49-72 Cambridge University Press