Epistemographer

(for those of you who aren’t in the academic tech community, this is going to seem a bit inside-baseball…feel free to move right along)

Over the weekend, Bruce D’Arcus wrote a blog post about Zotero in which he said that “one gets the sense of a project at the portals of the cathedral gazing out at the bazaar, but not yet ready to step out the door.” This has sparked a bunch of discussion among us Zoterons over the past few days, and I wanted to distill a bit of it here.

From my particular perspective within the Zotero project, it’s less that we’re not ready to step out the door than the simple fact that we’ve been so focused on short-term goals that bigger conversations like the ones Bruce wants to open up have fallen by the wayside. Yes, we’ve been less than responsive to Bruce’s requests, but not out of any deep or unconscious desire to stay within the cathedral. In fact, I’d argue that the cathedral/bazaar dichotomy, while useful for highlighting different modes of work, is also rather reductionist, and can distill the gray areas of actual practice into black and white strawmen.

There are a number of models for open source projects; the one we’ve been trying to follow at Zotero is one of open participation, driven by participants themselves. At this point, if you want to participate, you can get full read access to our bug tracking and versioning system, and write access once you’ve proven yourself. While the dev list has been low-traffic (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “dead”), the forums are extremely active, and we’re proud of a level of responsiveness by the whole team there that far surpasses expectations for an open source project. There are mechanisms for discussion, and we are deeply committed to F/OSS principles (along those lines, we’re going a step further and opening up our bug tracking system to full anonymous read access; Dan Stillman posted the details on the dev list yesterday). When we introduce something new, we see it as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one: the Word plugin, for example, is a first draft, and we’d love to see someone elaborate on it. As for OpenOffice functionality, we haven’t had time yet to really start that conversation (either with words or code), but we’d love to see someone else do so (and in fact might be able to compensate them for their time).

On the Word plugin: it seems to have come out of nowhere mainly because it did come out of nowhere. One of our developers, who’s currently in college, needed to write a paper and came back with a working Word plugin. This wasn’t a top-down directive so much as him saying “Hey, this’d be cool,” and pulling it out of thin air (he’s actually got quite a reputation around CHNM for suddenly producing incredibly cool bits of code). As for the OpenOffice functionality, when Kari wrote “We do indeed have plans to add support for OpenOffice—it should happen sometime in 2007” the meaning behind that was “We’ve been talking to Bruce and others, and we’re hoping to work with them later in 2007 to get a similar plugin running for OpenOffice.” The statement was more opaque than it might have been, but it doesn’t belie a master plan evolving within CHNM to exclude OpenOffice folks (heck, we’d love it if someone else would step up and start building that functionality, rather than waiting for us to do so).

In the end, I think (and this is now just speaking for myself, rather than on behalf of Zotero as a whole) that the one thing that we could do better is make the process of feature development more transparent; it seems that Bruce’s main concern is that there are discussions happening and decisions being made behind closed doors, without real community participation. This is true on some levels; since most of us have offices along the same hall, we have a bunch of informal conversations that we don’t report back to the dev list or forums immediately (unlike most traditional open source projects, in which virtually all essential discussion happens in public, electronic fora). Our first concern has been simply getting software out the door that appeals both to our sense of good design as well as what our grant funders want, and in that rush we’ve often taken the route of quick conversations and decisions which can appear opaque from outside the CHNM offices. With that in mind, we’re going to try to do better, pushing those discussions out onto the dev list (where anyone else who’s concerned can join in while things are being figured out) when possible, and doing frequent reports on in-house projects and planned features out to the group…

Beyond that, however, there is an aspect by which Zotero will be always a bit cathedral-like; our current model is more like a service, where the core app is developed by a relatively small group of in-house or vetted devs, but with tons of hooks and an API enabling the flourishing of third-party utilities that extend it. We’ve created detailed developer documentation, including a sample utility, and we’ll be adding more to this as our APIs stabilize. Zotero has been built from Day 1 to be extensible in nearly every way possible. In short, less a massive cathedral than a small building in the middle of the bazaar…

Inspired by a post by Jean Burgess, a tag cloud visualization of my book manuscript, (currently being copyedited):

(via TagCrowd)

The CES Swarm went swimmingly (there’s really something to this idea of collaborative research), and now I’m back home starting to fit the pieces together and figure out what I make of them. Some fragments:

• Going into this year’s show, I had a few established interests: the relationship between amateurs/enthusiasts and professionals, the role of conventions as social spaces for communities to cohere, and the fetishization of technology.
• One of the things I kept hearing prior to and during the show was an underlying narrative questioning the relevance of CES as a show. In several press accounts before the show, you had retailers asking themselves whether it was even worth attending the show, given its cost and sprawl, a sense which was echoed by a few of the attendees I spoke with.
• There seems to be a core contradiction in the gatekeeping mechanisms for the show – CES bills itself as the world’s biggest technology trade show (a claim which bears no small resonance with earlier World’s Fair hype), and there’s a sense that the sheer size of the trade show floors and numbers of attendees are some of CES’s greatest assets (the show is measured in square feet and bodies), thus more attendees = better. However, perhaps in response to the aforementioned relevancy questions, the registration process repeatedly emphasized that attendees (who could register for free up to a week before the show) must be affiliated with the consumer electronics industry, implicitly restricting attendance (and going against the bigger = better rhetoric by which the show is advertised).
• This tension is, of course, ultimately bunk…one of the worst-kept secrets around CES is how ridiculously easy it is, in fact, to get an attendee badge. My favorite interview of the show was with a guy who fabricated a video store two decades ago, and attends every year with his made-up business cards; most don’t go to those lengths, however, and one could argue that it would be pretty difficult, in this day and age, for an interested party to find a consumer technology relationship, however tenuous, with his or her own work.
• Which leads me to the relative unusefulness of “Consumer Electronics Industry” as a category, consumer technology being so vague and pervasive that virtually anything might conceivably fit under its umbrella.
• On the press coverage: while the registration and gatekeeping mechanisms were all about keeping the public out, the media narratives were all about simulating the experience of being an enthusiast visiting the show. Press coverage bypassed the “Industry” part of the show almost entirely, except in the sense that manufacturers were displaying their wares…from the vantage of the television cameras and newspaper reports, retail and distribution were functionally invisible.

• Another axis: the main CES foci were screens and mobile devices. That said, the really big announcement of the week didn’t even come out of Vegas, but hundreds of miles NW in San Francisco, where Apple unveiled both the iPhone and AppleTV. On the CES floor, there was only a very small sense of impact, but in the Press Room on that Tuesday morning the buzz was all about MacWorld, and a cursory look at press coverage seems to bear that assessment out.

As I wrote a few days back, one of the threads underlying much of my thinking over the past year has been how we might use technology to nudge “scholarship” in a more publicly engaged direction. As a good STS do-bee, however, I’m the first to say that the technology isn’t what effects change, but rather it’s the people using it. That in mind, I’m heading off to the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this Sunday for a group experiment in new modes of scholarship.

The original idea came out of an ECHO workshop that I ran at GMU a year and a half ago. A few of us (Julian Kilker and Alex Russo, to be precise) were talking about the general isolation of research and writing in the humanities, and wondering if there were some way to set up a more collaborative research project. Somehow (I can’t recall exactly how), we hit on the Consumer Electronics Show as an intriguing site, one which was way too big for any one person to tackle as a researcher. What if, we thought, we could get a bunch of scholars from across the disciplines together in that one place, turn the pack loose on the site and then bounce ideas off of each other? What kind of scholarship could that produce?

Over the next year and a half, the idea mutated a bit; at some point, it took on the name “Swarm Scholarship.” We looked into funding, but nothing really panned out. Finally, at this year’s SHOT meeting in Las Vegas, we decided to do something about this for real, on the cheap. Julian could line up housing and some space on campus through UNLV, and the only other costs for participants would be airfare and food. In the span of a month and a half, we circulated a proposal (see the full proposal below) via a few mailing lists and word of mouth, and received dozens of expressions of interest.

So, on Sunday about 15 scholars from around the country will be meeting up at Julian’s house in Las Vegas. We’ll compare interests, coordinate schedules, and then spend the next two days immersed in CES. Afterwards, we’ll spend the better part of a day giving from-the-hip “talks” on our ideas-in-progress, then head home to write. The goal is to get this published in some form or another sooner than later, aiming for something with the substance of scholarship but the latency of feature journalism.

And I’m sure I’ll blog more about it sooner than later. (more…)

Finally (after three months of “I’ll get to it one of these days”) switched this site over to Dreamhost. If you find anything that seems buggy, please let me know…