I was away for a few days, doing field studies. This is what I found in my Inbox when I got back to work:
“Turning Munster Red”
The Munster Rugby Supporters Club is asking the workplaces of Munster to become a sea of red the day before the Heineken Cup. In preparation for the big day in Cardiff the 19th of May is to be designated Munster Red Day.
All factories, shops, offices and schools are being asked to participate in the initiative by encouraging employees and pupils to wear the Munster colours to work or school. Some of the largest employers and schools throughout the province have already agreed to show their support for the Munster Rugby team by allowing employees to wear jerseys and red clothing.
Hmm… that explained why a lot of people in my department were wearing red that day!
On Saturday, I decided to go to the city center and join the crowd. Many of my colleagues said they will be there, the atmosphere was fantastic, and, the most important thing, MUNSTER WON THE CUP!
A few images taken in the hours before the game … So that you can see how Munster red looks like!
May 20 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I just finished reading “The Deadline” by Tom deMarco, an excellent novel about project management. Here’s a good review by Richard Mateosian, and the first chapter is offered for preview here.
A few words on the plot: Webster Tompkins, a systems manager who has just been laid off from a giant telecommunications company, is kidnapped by a charming spy and brought to the fictitious state of Morovia to organise its software development industry and put to work about 1500 software engineers who are supposed to re-produce six carefully chosen (already existing) software products in a two years period.
From Tompkins’ perspective, the four most essential ingredients of management are:
- people selection
- task matching
- motivation
- team formation
– and he calls all the rest Administrivia.
Because he has too many people that have to be given some work to do, Tompkins decides to try a controlled experiment, running three parallel projects with teams of different sizes and using different methods. He envisages a sort of world’s first project management laboratory.
Tompkins is seconded by Belinda Binda -a bag lady who used to be the world’s greatest
project manager in her day, and who eventually recovers from her burn-out after embarking upon this experiment. She had also been kidnapped and offered Tompkins’ position before, but she declined and found refuge on the Morovian beaches searching in containers.
Reading the book was a delight, I was looking forward to the evenings and to travel time when I was able to continue reading.
I particularly liked this conversation between Tompkins and Belinda Binda, where Belinda explains that management involves heart, gut, soul and nose.
The ‘heady’ leader can lead, but people won’t follow. You can’t do much about the heart you’ve got, and maybe you have to be born to it. However, there are people who grow into management ; they start awkward and become confident and eventually make wonderful managers.
The soul has to do with the fact that projects prosper to the extent that people learn to work together effectively. If they work entirely apart, a bunch of piece workers in different places who didn’t even know each other, then soul wouldn’t matter. Management would be a simple matter of coordinating their efforts. It would be an entirely mechanic process.
..the real world requires close, warm, and almost intimate interconnections between team members, and easy, effective interaction through the whole organization.
And Belinda emphasizes that the manager can’t make this happen – he has to let it happen, to create an atmosphere where it can happen. If he’s lucky, it does happen. That’s what she calls building soul into the organization.
She also speaks about a team’s need for a shared vision (could be a cult of quality work, the feeling of being an elite or simply integrity): …the group desperately wants to be unified. The human creature has – built into its firmware – a need to be part of a community. And, in today’s rather sterile modern world, there isn’t much community to be had.
The scene is absolutely fantastic – a top manager getting advice from a bag lady in a Morovian park on soul and community;-)
And it relates to my current work – how to create this atmosphere where flow can actually happen ? From user-centred design to team-centred design – isn’t this what CSCW is all about?!
April 08 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m in Vienna for a short vacation with my daughter. I was supposed to be online, both for doing some urgent work, and for blogging – after all, I’m on vacation, and I’m supposed to do whatever I love to.
Well, the Internet connection of the friend who’s hosting me refuses to work. It worked at my arrival on my own laptop – not anymore! In situations like this, I used to say it wasn’t meant to – now I started doubting about my own theory… What’s the use of a vacation if you can’t do the things you like?! Weather is bad – grey skies and -6 to -8, I’m really looking forward to landing back in Dublin on St.Patrick’s Day!
We visited the MUMOK yesterday, and Albertina today – a brilliant Egon Schiele exhibition!
I’d really like to see the Leopold Museum tomorrow, there’s a Klimt-Schiele-Kokoschka exhibition, but I have no idea if I can convince my daughter to bear with me!
I’ll try chasing some Vienna wi-fi hotspots …maybe.
Anyhow, I hope to be back here in October, for BlogTalk reloaded…
March 16 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m far behind with my blogging – and there are so many exciting things happening in my life!
This afternoon I had the chance to participate in an interactive session on the Elluminate platform (oh, I should mention first that I’m taking Choconancy’s Facilitating Online Workshop).
It was a really “illuminating” experience, with Fernanda Ibarra as facilitator. Instead of a chair, I got a yoga mat (how could she guess my preference for sitting on the floor?!)
February 13 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
In the New Year, may your right hand always be stretched out in friendship but never in want!
I found this Irish toast, and I liked it a lot…
Today is Women’s Christmas (Nollaig na mBan in Irish)- I heard it on the radio and asked a few people what was this tradition. In the end, Wikipedia told me: Irish men are taking on all the household duties on this day and give their spouses a day off! Very nice of them;-)
I went to a SQRL lecture today: Spencer Smith, from McMaster University, Canada , talked about the relationship between Computer Science and Software Engineering: “Is Computer Science to Software Engineering as Physics is to Civil Engineering?”
The same old debate: is Software Engineering real engineering at all?!
Went back and checked Wikipedia again:
“The term software engineering was used occasionally in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though some argue that software engineering was coined by F.L. Bauer. It was popularized by the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference held in Garmisch, Germany, and has been in widespread use since.”
A label was applied, probably with the intent of introducing a more structured approach to an emmergent domain (or to sell it better?!)
In any case, rivers of ink have flown ever since – both pro and con…
Update: Browsing through the podcasts from IT Conversations I’ve been listening to last year, I located Alistair Cockburn’s interview on Agile Software Development who also mentioned this issue:
“Doug Kaye: How about the engineering metaphor? In what ways is software development like engineering or not like engineering?
Alistair Cockburn: Well, here’s the thing that was a surprise to me. Well, I did, again, two things. I looked at the history of the term “software engineering,” where it came from, and then I had to look at the term “engineering” itself and what does that mean. And it came around full circle in an odd way that engineering itself is to a very large extent also a cooperative game of invention and communication. So everything I said just now about developing software applies also to pretty much any engineering project, with the possible exception of bridge building, which is so candid in the books that you look stuff up, look up all the answers.
But in the history of these things as I chased it down, after the Second World War, engineering took an odd turn. And as the reading came to me that I got was after the Second Word War, there was a “discipline envy,” as we as we might call it, of applied physics. So, applied physics had done great things in the Second World War, we got atomic bombs, we got missiles, we got all that kind of stuff, all based on heavy application of math and a priori in-advanced thinking and design. And engineering got this little envy of this other discipline that we saw an increase in the amount of applied mathematics being shoved into the engineering curriculum at the major colleges after the Second World War.
In 1967, the Dean of Engineering at Harvard wrote up a thing where he said, “I think we’ve gone too far. We’ve lost the art aspect, the contact aspect.” Engineering is very sensitive to people having contact with the materials and having a deep, visceral, personal understanding of the behavior of the material they’re working with, whether it’s construction or electricity or whatever it could be, and was advocating a return. But the problem being that in the academic tradition that was building up at the time, the practitioners were getting devalued and the theoreticians were getting more valued.
Now then, I jump to the next thing. In 1968 there was this NATO conference on software engineering. And when you read the preface to that — you can find it online — in the preface, it says, “We wanted to come up with a provocative term, and so we chose this term “software engineering” as a provocative term.” That was a big shock to me when I read it because I think, like most people, they assumed that somebody had said… there was reason to believe that software development is a branch of engineering, but, in fact, what these people were saying is, “We don’t like the state that software development is, so we will throw out this word “engineering” and suggest that it should be like engineering and see what goes from there.”
So they had a big impact, but if you read through their description, they didn’t understand what engineering was. They were thinking of engineering as being lots of a priori modelling, lots of math, and all of that stuff. So they were buying in to the face that had been put on engineering, not that it was true, but the public face that had been put on engineering. If you’re inside the same conference where they interview each other and you look at what they do, when they say what works, you’ll find, “Put ten people in a room, give them lots of face to face, make sure there’s a filing cabinet, watch who uses the filing cabinets, gossip is good because it helps pass information around.” All the stuff that I write about in “Agile Software Development” put inside this cooperative game is right there under everyone’s noses when they are doing individual personal experiences and recommendations. And then you’ll find them throwing in a sentence out of the blue which is like, “Ah! We build software these days like the Wright brothers built airplanes; just build it, throw it of a cliff and see if it survives the crash,” which is wrong because the Wright brothers, they invented the wind tunnel basically, and they made tables of lifts and stuff, so they were doing real engineering.
So the people who are coining the phase “software engineering” didn’t understand engineering. It wasn’t a deduced term; it was a provocative term, in their own words. And so we’ve now come in a sense to fully believe the face value, the false face, that these guys falsely put on engineering.
So it comes around full circle when you look at it back again; there’s a lot of similarity between software development and engineering, but not the obvious one. It’s that they’re both examples of cooperative games of invention and communication.”
January 04 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I keep on lecturing people that blogs are like Tamagotchi, you have to write regularly in order to keep them alive, and I am the first not to follow what I am preaching!
I guess I have to overcome two major mental obstacles:
– that even if it’s fun and I like doing it, blogging is not a distraction, it is part of my work and I don’t have to experience any guilt when I feel like blogging;
– I don’t have to persevere in postponing to blog about one topic until I fulfill my self-imposed duty of finishing an older draft – this strategy won’t take me anywhere!
After I left my parents’ home to go to the university in the capital city, expecting to get liberated from all the strict rules they were imposing on me, I discovered with astonishment that I was re-inforcing those rules on myself more severely than my parents used to do it.
Old habits die hard – and it looks like I can’t prevent the history from repeating itself. My current position gives me all the freedom I could have ever dreamed of, and – probably because no one else is imposing me anything – here I am making new stupid rules for myself!
Well, lots of things happened since my last post. I missed the Social Computing seminar at Oxford, but then I also missed the TechCamp in Dublin because of a bad flu.
I was invited to give a lecture on Social Software at Trinity College in Dublin at the end of October – oh, my, oh my! what a Cinderella feeling I had entering the main gate at Trinity! I used to dream that place night and day back in 2000, when my paper got accepted at the IS/IT Evaluation Conference but unfortunately I couldn’t find the funding to attend!
Teaching at Trinity – nice experience, bright students, impressive atmosphere! When I asked if they ever tried to contribute to the Wikipedia, the students pointed me to this article😉
Then I decided to skip the Fringe at KCC Europe – too much work to do, nobody was able to tell me who else was going there, the knowledgenetworker wiki page was last updated in July. It sounded to me like a silence conspiration – or maybe I was looking for excuses?! I’m sorry I missed it now, I feel kind of disconnected from the KM community. And I still wonder why so few people blogged about!
I started a new blog at elgg – this is why – trying to support a bunch of young people who really deserve it. Time is never enough, my involvment in that project is not the one I’d wanted it to be, but I still hope it will make a difference…
Then I had to travel to Romania, for the last meeting in the Pellea project, the one who provided me with the chance to organise that online blogging course in Romanian last year. The time was short, the weather changing from Indian summer to snow and frost, and there was no way to meet everyone and to do all the work I planned.
On the way back, a short break in Amsterdam – beautiful city, lots of hidden treasures, magic places like this one, I’ll be always happy to go back there. A few misadventures in restaurants ( I was served a “vegetable soup” that proved to contain a big piece of meat, 2 1/2 h spent waiting for one pancake), but the biggest surprise was reserved for the Dublin airport at my return.
The immigration officer told me I am not allowed to enter Ireland, because I lack a visa. A 24kg suitcase, a sore throat and 10 days of travel behind, this was the last thing I needed. I tried to explain no one asked for a visa when I came back from Frankfurt, I showed him my residence card, and I was pretty sure I was right. In the end, I proved to be wrong, the documents I have by now only allow me to stay in Ireland, but not to travel back and forth.
So this is the end of travel for this year – no more ‘s-Hertogenbosch for the final meeting of the PACE project. A pity – I would have loved to participate in the conference organised on this occasion and say good-bye to the partners I worked with in the last 2 1/2 years!
But…you can’t have them all, isn’t it?!
December 01 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tomorrow at Oxford, the seminar on “Social Computing & The Organisation“.
Sounds like a great event! Let’s keep an eye on it – in case Piers Young will find the time to blog it!
Unfortunately, I still don’t have a British visa.
But I’m looking forward to next week’s TechCamp in Dublin!
October 06 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The European Conference on Knowledge Management is hosted by the University of Limerick this year. Most of the guests arrived yesterday, and we had a cocktail and a nice dinner together. Academic Conferences did a great job with the organization, as they did in every year.
I was so happy to meet Dan Remenyi, Sue Nugus and their whole team again!
Yesterday, I met David Gurteen in person, and we had an interesting talk over dinner. I guess we annoyed a bit the others with our blog–wiki–Lilia–Ton–Martin jargon, but we tried to convince them it was worth it at least to have a look at the Social Software phenomenon.
Bernard Marr gave his keynote speech this morning.
David Gurteen will run a knowledge-cafe this afternoon.
Charles Despres will deliver a speech after the banquet at the Bunratty Castle.
And Larry Prusak will give the other keynote speech tomorrow morning.
It’s amazing how much energy I can get from being in the middle of “my kind of people”.
I don’t experience hunger, sleep or thirst anymore… I guess I’m in a state of flow😉
I’ll have to run back now.
Btw, Carla Verwijs is here too – she might be blogging the event!
Few photos already on Flickr!
September 08 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I just arrived in Frankfurt at the Haus der Jugend for the Wikimania.
Somebody showed me Jimbo Wales few minutes ago, and from his page I found out he’s an admirer of Ayn Rand. I was talking to my room mate few minutes ago about how her novels changed my whole perspective.
The atmosphere is terrific, wi fi is working everywhere ( despite some worries) – actually I’m on the top of my bed right now! – and I’m going to have a shower before joining the others for dinner.
I already met Tsahi Hayat on the bus, I’m looking forward to listening to his presentation on Saturday.
Technorati Tag: WikiMania
August 04 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Looking at my Blogger account, I realised I haven’t posted a word in the last 4 weeks. I have a lot of drafts, some of them with photos and links, but I never found the time to finish them.
I guess I’ll give up blogging forever if I’ll continue this way.
Well, first it was an anti-procrastination strategy. I told myself I’ll be allowed to blog at the end of the day, because I have to put work on the first place – and this is how I ended with all those drafts. Now I realise I’m procrastinating blogging too – I can’t find my motivation to refine a post after weeks!
I guess the best thing to do would be to forget about the drafts. They were all interesting, but they are “old news” by now. And wipe out the guilt – looks like I’m the only one who can absolve me of this sin!
Of course, I have plenty of excuses. I’m working on this new project. I moved into a new apartment(it’s literally brand new!). I had a dear guest from Germany and we spent time together driving through the South of the island. I gave my “house warming” party. I am connecting to new people…
But none of them is good enough for having neglected my blog for such a long time. I repent, and I’m back to writing and posting!
July 24 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
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A few images taken in the hours before the game … So that you can see how Munster red looks like!