At the end of April, I attended an event organised by the IBM Ireland Innovation Centre in Dublin. Together with colleagues from several other Irish universities, we listened to some excellent presentations about the IBM Academic Initiative and the ongoing projects at the Dublin Software Lab. During the break, we had the chance to network and have a look at 3 remarkable demos. The presentations are now available for download.You’ll probably have to sign up for a developerWorks account first, but it is well worth it!
This is when I first heard about INNOV8 – “an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the fundamentals of business process management and bridge the gap in understanding between business leaders and IT teams in an organization.”
I invited Joanne Stanley from the Dublin IBM Innovation Centre to give a presentation on it at 3Dcamp, and I got a positive answer yesterday. Joanne wrote that if she can’t make it to Limerick, either her or Kevin Farrar, the IBM Academic Initiative Programme Leader for the UK and Ireland, will participate remotely and give a presentation on Innov8.
A short excerpt from the press release on the latest version of Innov8:
Building on the success of the original INNOV8 in the academic community, INNOV8 v.2 will be available at no cost to businesses and academic institutions for simulations and training. The new version features puzzles and tasks that challenge players to tackle real-world challenges. INNOV8 v.2 delivers a complete redesign of the game, with a new global collaboration feature for players to work with virtual teammates to progress to the next level of the game. In addition, three new game scenarios reflect a new level of intelligence required for future, high-value job opportunities:
‘Green’ Supply Chain: Players evaluate a traditional supply chain model and are tasked with reducing a fictional company’s carbon footprint.
Efficient Traffic Flow: Players evaluate existing traffic patterns and re-route traffic based on sensors that alert the player to disruptions such as accidents and roadway congestion.
Call Center Customer Service: Using a call center environment, players develop more efficient ways to respond to customers.
Every now and then, Lero- The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre organises industry days, where researchers talk about their work with Irish practitioners. The one we had today happened in Dublin, and was hosted by Enterprise Ireland in its East Point premises in Dublin. It was organised in connection with the conference we are hosting this summer at UL – the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, for which I happen to be the local organisation chair.
(Photos by Jack Downey, the Lero Industry officer whose organisation efforts made the event possible.)
The event included 3 talks and time for networking and discussions; there were approx 30 attendees.The detailed programme can be found here.
Dr.Ita Richardson spoke about the need for extending standards like CMMI and ISO15504 to include guidelines for Global Software Development and regulated industries such as medical devices.
My talk was a reflection on the role of collaborative practices such as informal communication, socialisation and cultural mediation. I introduced the socGSD project. I spoke a bit about my field sites and the use of ethnographic methods. I shared with the audience a number of stories on things as banal as using instant messaging, Skype and social networking applications in day-to-day collaboration between distributed team members. No matter how banal they look like, a lot of managers don’t seem to understand yet their role as the glue that brings people together and allows them to create rapport. I concluded with a few recommendations, emphasizing the role of direct and frequent communication between sites, flexibility in organisational practices and cultural mediation. I got very positive feedback after the talk – several participants came to me to tell me how they resonated with the things I spoke about.
The third speaker was Vikas Sahni of Softedge Systems and it was great to hear from a practitioner how some of the things I touched upon in my talk were seen from the other side. One point where Vikas disagreed with me was cultural mediation and the role of people who can bridge different cultures. He gave the example of an Indian project manager based in Ireland who had difficulties in syncronising with his developers in India, while an Irish project manager was getting excellent results with an Indian team. In my view, this proves the danger of generalisation and of talking about “good practices”.
What works in one case can fail in another, because software is developed by people, and most problems are not connected to technology, but to people, to paraphrase Tom DeMarco. Not everyone can be a cultural mediator – it is a matter of people skills and personality. Next week, my colleague Alexander Boden will present our joint paper and poster on the topic of cultural mediation at the CHASE workshop collocated with ICSE’09 in Vancouver.
It was a wonderful sunny day, so after contemplating the idea of seeing the Bodies exhibition, I followed an impulse I had since the day I first arrived in Dublin – to get on an open bus and do the tourist tour.
I hoped off in Stephen’s Green and sat on the grass for a while, and then hopped back on. I was planning to see a film at the IFI, but because the bus got stuck in traffic, I got off in Heuston and returned to Limerick.
Thanks to Twitter again and to the serendipity it creates, I came across a talk titled “Fake Ethnography vs. Real Ethnography” by Aviva Rosenstein from the User Research Friday held in San Francisco last November.
And James Kalbach did a great job summarising it on his blog!
This is an ongoing debate: do researchers from other domains than anthropology really do ethnography? Or we should only speak about “using ethnographic methods”?
In our project, even if we did field studies during extended periods of time, we preferred to state that we used “ethnographically-informed” methods. Anyhow, Rosenstein makesthe point in the conclusion of her talk: if you are stating your possible bias, you are collecting data (instead of recording assumptions), you’re treating your informants well and you’re also observing what they actually do without relying entirely on what they say they do, if you are trying to understand things at a deeper level, look for patterns and write the whole thing down, you are doing decent research employing ethnographic methods. In the end, the measure of success is delivering some value to the organisation you’re working with!
I loved the advice she gave to researchers : mix and match, be creative and resourceful bricoleurs, make mistakes and tell the others about them, and… be brave!
The talk rang a big bell to me – it is so difficult to walk on this narrow path when there’s criticism everywhere, and so good to hear some words of encouragement!
“Here’s a clever way to do a conference: make it short (four hours), make it entertaining (fast, opinionated presentations), do it in a bar. User Research Friday, hosted by Bolt Peters in SF, has used this formula to great effect a couple of times so far, most recently on November 7, when six speakers in the design research field kept 140 of their colleagues spellbound, then stuck around for drinks.”
Really – an interesting idea!
I tried to retrieve the tweets from the event – there’s a twitter feed on the screen during the final sequences of the video, and Bolt | Peters mentions #URF08 as hashtag, but summize doesn’t seem to find anything. An application for extracting and archiving event Twitter feeds anyone?!
I went to the Limerick OpenCoffee Club this morning. I could afford this luxury, as the semester is over- no more teaching on Thursdays- and my contract ended anyhow.
We had quite a few of new attendees, and I tried to play the host. Don’t think I succeeded very well, because I was too nervous thinking of the 1000 different things I had to postpone doing for going there! But anyhow, after 10 min and 2 urgent mails sent, I managed to sink into the relaxed atmosphere…
Elaine Rogers from Seefin Coaching spoke about Time Management, and
John Gleeson from the University of Limerick (UL) spoke about Technology Transfer.
I had my laptop with me, and instead of taking notes, I felt like twittering what was going on. Read from the bottom up if you want to make any sense of it!These are all the tweets under #LOCC during those hours!
The funny part was that Ger Hartnett read my tweet about Elaine’s slide with a list of time wasters, and asked if Twitter was on the list. I presented Elaine with the comment (in almost real time), and she confessed she avoided it on purpose… because herself spends a lot of time on Twitter.
gabig58#LOCC Partner with researchers and research groups, make your skill sets known to UL, suggest interesting problems, tap into EI support about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58omg! 5 new followers in the last 20 min, just because I’m tweeting from #LOCC! Thank you! Hope my battery won’t fail me! about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC For companies looking for collaboration with universities,have a look at Innovation Vouchers and Innovation Partnerships(EI funded) about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC John Gleeson’s role at UL is to facilitate university – industry linkages and research commercialisation about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC A bit of history – the establishment of UL in 1972, a picture of the White House and one of the Living Bridge about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC if procrastination is taking up,and you spend your day on Twitter, FB,YouTube -your body is actually telling you it’s time for a break about 20 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC The mayonese jar story:you can put the golf balls in,the pebbles and the sand -but there’s always space left for a cuppa with a friend about 20 hours ago from web
And then I ran home to finish my slides for the Lero Industry Day on Monday.
In the evening, I went to an event organised by the Limerick County Enterprise Board: a talk by Brody Sweeney, the man behind O’Briens Sandwich Bars, titled “The real way to start up and stay in business”. The talk was the most inspiring event I went to lately! Brody spoke with extreme honesty about the problem he faced along the way, the sometimes unorthodox approaches he had to take, and what really counts. What really counts are people and hard work – and this struck a chord in me! We’ve heard the same thing from Patrick Collison at the OpenCoffee almost a year ago – there’s really hard work behind any successful business!
And the message we all took home was that there’s an opportunity in every apparently bad thing that’s happening to us – and the current recession is no exception! So I’ll try to get up smiling tomorrow morning, start with my best foot and see the hidden opportunities behind all this apparent doom and gloom everybody seems to be whining about!
I took the pledge initiated by Suw Charman-Anderson to write a blog post about a woman in technology on Ada Lovelace’s day a few months ago. The following day I started thinking about who would be that woman. I know a lot of remarkable women among bloggers, researchers, software engineers, entrepreneurs, freelancers – I could probably fill a good few pages with names only! And then the choice came naturally: I will honour someone who is an authority in my field of research, and at the same time a fellow country woman.
A few months after, I wrote to her about the idea of creating a collaboration platform for the Global Software Engineering community. She accepted my suggestions, but was already a few steps ahead, and the platform became reality soon after that. We stayed in touch, my group invited her to Limerick, but unfortunately she couldn’t make it- her second baby was on the way. The first time we met face to face was at the second international conference on Global Software Engineering – ICGSE’07 in Munich – but it felt like we knew each other for a long, long time.
The ICGSE series of conferences are the continuation of a series of workshops organised or co-organised by Daniela since 2002 that had the role of bringing together a pretty diverse community of academics, researchers and practitioners interested in the field. We have the honour of hosting it here in Limerick this year, and I’m involved in the organisation.
Daniela studied Computer Science in Romania, where she graduated in 1995. She went on to do a masters, and then a PhD in Computer Science/Software Engineering at the University of Calgary in Canada. She finished both her MSc and PhD in 5 years in total, a very short time (5 years is the usual time for a PhD only). Daniela got her PhD in 2001. After one year spent as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and working with Unisys, she returned to Canada and joined the University of Victoria as an Assistant Professor. In 2007, she became an Associate Professor. She is the initiator and the head of the Software Engineering Global interAction Lab – SEGAL at UVic.
This academic year, Daniela is on sabbatical. She spent the first half in Europe and now she’s in Australia. Her husband and two kids are accompanying her. With all her hectic schedule, she was kind enough to answer to a few questions I asked in preparation for this blog post.
I wanted to know what made her choose Computer Science/Software Engineering in the first place, and what attracted her to academia. Here is her answer:
I was very good in math. I was one of the very few young girls competing in national math competitions along with my good male colleagues in middle and high school. A turning point happened in my life when I was discussing with my mom about university… it became clear that I was made to pursue impact in my life, and chose Informatics as a university major because i could apply my strong math skills in the domain of computer science. The specialization in Software Engineering was the result of further inclination for practical application — learning about software development and the challenge of translating customers’ needs into a workable product was just the right for me.Academia also came as a natural choice given my enthusiasm in teaching young minds to be good software engineers themselves. A post-doc in an industrial environment (Unisys) made me be sure that I wished to pursue an academic environment in which to teach students about and how to address the real world software problems, as well as to mentor students become researchers in Software Engineering themselves.
Next thing I wanted to know was if the fact of being a woman working in a technological domain has made any difference:
I think so. Having trained and competed with my boy classmates in math competitions, I always had to convince myself that I could do as well as anybody else. Perhaps that gave me the extra energy to do well. Later on, as a teacher, researcher, supervisor AND a mother in recent years has really been a great challenge but also an opportunity to realize how much women raise to the expectations around them, how well they figure out how to prioritize things in their lives, and how great they are BECAUSE they have this opportunity and experience.
My final question was about something that intrigued me ever since I heard about Daniela:
What is the secret of your fantastic energy? You’re involved in so many things, you have a family and kids at the same time, and you’re following your students very closely. How in the world can one cover all this?
And here is her answer:
I just love what I do :). Or perhaps I just do what I love. I have great mentors, and I listen to them. I surround myself with people that enjoy life and what they do. I take energy from positive people, and I try to empower and inspire others with same positive energy. I have become more humble every year recently, and I try to learn as much as I can from others everyday. As such, every day is a great day because the world around me is what and how I decide to see it. The students I collaborate with are a great source of energy for me themselves, teaching me how to stay sharp so I can help them become who they want to be.
Daniela was very generous sharing “her secret” with every one. We all have our ups and downs. If every one of us could remember that “every day is a great day” and it all depends on what we decide to make of it, this would be a better world!
I had in plan to go to Bizcamp Dublin ever since I heard it was going to happen. On the very morning I felt dead tired and didn’t want to get out of bed, but in the end I managed. And wasn’t sorry: the day was great value! It was worth it spending 7h on the bus just to be there!
They decided to have a fixed schedule for the day, which was available for download before the event. Usually at barcamps we have a board with post-its that can be shuffled and re-shuffled many times during the day, but I was so grateful the bizcamp Dublin organisers gave us a printed schedule to serve us as a guide during the day!
I was late in the morning, so I missed Aileen Hannan‘s talk“Practical Finances for Entrepreneurs”. Even if I had the chance to listen to her at Barcamp Cork and I’m reading her blog, I still regretted it.
I went to the Dan Barry talk “Legal issues facing start-up businesses“ – I found it excellent, to the point, full of very practical advice.
I hesitated between Niall Harbison‘s talk “Marketing and Growing Your Start-Up” (I am a real fan of Niall and a great admirer of the way he uses social media!) and Yanky Fachler‘s “Using chutzpah (balls, brass neck) to get through closed doors”. I must confess the subtitle “The emotional transition from employee to self employed” made me go to Yanky’s talk- the talk was nice and entertaining, but it didn’t do anything for me. He didn’t speak specifically about this transition, but rather shared anecdotes about how some of today’s success people started.
It was the first time I had the chance to listen to Emily Tully in person (I visited her blog though!) – her talk on “Self Promotion/ how to use PR and the media to your advantage” was excellent. She spoke about things such as having different press releases for old and new media, being honest and thinking about your audience.
During lunch everybody had the chance to meet old acquaintances and make new ones. I’ve done a brief survey regarding the interest in having a 3Dcamp at UL in June (looks like we should do it!) and interviewed this young fellow who didn’t seem at ease among so many adults. He told me all he’d like to see at Bizcamp Limerick – I hope we can live up his expectations!
The afternoon started with a panel discussion moderated impetuously byPatricia O’Sullivan : Successful Fundraising. 5 people sharedtheir experience in obtaining funds for their start-ups: Caelen King from RevaHealth.com, Niall Harbison – lookandtaste.com, Campbell Scott from IGOPeople, Keith Bohanna – dbTwang, and Ciaran Crean – MicksGarage. They were joined by two advisors from Enterprise Ireland. I wish the panel would have been given a bit more time – they all had interesting things to say, and the room was buzzing with energy.
I was tempted to join the Battle of the Biz session run by Robin Blandford after that, but I decided it’d be better to learn something about branding. Gerard Tannam‘s session “Branding Your Start-Up From The Get-Go” was probably the highlight of the whole Bizcamp for me: straight to the point, informative, practical and stimulating. I had several “eureka” moments during that talk – it was really worth it! The interesting thing was that the room was completely packed – either people have developed a nose for quality sessions, or they deserted the Battle of the Biz after it was explained to them.
I returned to the big room just in time to catch a presentation by one of the competing teams and couldn’t make much sense of the presence on stage of 5 young ladies who seemed to have been got there by accident!
I wanted to listen to Chris Byrne, but he didn’t make it up from Cork. The final session I say in was run by Jane Hogan and Sean Kirwan . Both of them spoke about how to increase your sales – a lot of enthusiasm, but to my taste they sounded a bit like the network marketing talks I used to listen to in the late 90s. If you take away the enthusiasm, there’s not much substance left!
It’s amazing how the span of attention is almost unlimited during such events! I’ve never got bored at any unconference type event – there are so many interesting people to talk to and speakers to listen to, that it is difficult to divide your time. Could we do something similar in academia? Have one day a month when anybody can volunteer to give a talk, and allow the students to go wherever they want…
..or how I managed to get dead frozen selling Romanian language lessons on Bedford Row on Saturday;)
A year ago, I found out about the existence of an organisation meant to bring together the Romanians living in Limerick. I started going to their monthly meetings whenever I could find the time, and I met very interesting people from all the paths of life there. At the first IRCBA meeting this year- I heard about the Excursions Performance festival and the “Sell your language” happening organised by Ania Bas as part of it. Me and my colleague Daniela Butan decided to give it a try.
We found Ania (who is Polish) and Helena Zelesakova (Slovakian) on Bedford Row, and we joined them. I must say that the “would you like to buy a language?” approach didn’t suit me, so I kind of turned it into “would you like to buy a language lesson?”. Daniela and I offered 5 min Romanian language lessons for 1 eur – a rather competitive price, taking into account that Slovak and Polish lessons cost 1.50 and 2 euros!
A lot of bypassers didn’t pay any attention to us, but quite a few asked for more detail, and a few accepted our offer. It was interesting to see how perfect Romanian pronounciation someone can achieve in just 5 minutes!
I didn’t make any money on the day, but I managed to learn some Irish in exchange!
I would have loved to see a lot more people involved in teaching their own language – the mix of languages offered was exclusively East European, while there’s such a variety of people coming from different corners of the world living in Limerick!
This created a lot of buzz and the idea of organising a BarCamp focusing on entrepreneurship and start-ups
Then, I came across Stephen Kinsella’s post and listened to the podcast- he was talking about a University initiative group. It occurred to me that we should join forces, so I drew his attention to the LOCC idea.
Twitter did the rest. Other people jumped in, so on January 23, we met in UL for the first time to discuss how, when, where, who. Why was obvious: trying to turn a bad thing around… The discussion started with Stephen Kinsella, Hughie Tiernan, Bernie Goldbach and myself around the table. David Quaid, Evert Bopp, Ger Hartnett and Shane McAllister joined us shortly. We were all buzzing with great ideas about speakers, sessions, advertising and so on. The only problem we had was with the date: Stephen had already made a provisory booking of the lecture hall and break-out rooms in the Kemmy Business School. And the date was March 7. Bernie told us he just spoke to Keith Bohanna and that was the date they had picked up for Bizcamp Dublin. A short conversation with Keith on the phone, a tentative of bringing the Dublin Bizcamp to Limerick alltogether, the frightening spectrum of having two competing events on the same day, a check of the rugby calendar, and we agreed to move the event to March 21. Dellcamp became Bizcamp Limerick!
We went to see the facilities and everybody was impressed by the new KBS building.
Stephen Kinsella has the whole story in this blogpost.
Last night I went to the Daghdha space in St John’s Square to attend a talk by a Finnish scholar. Dr. Jaana Parviainen from the University of Tampere spoke about: “The Crisis of Knowledge: How We Know In and Through the Moving Body”. The talk was preceded by a dance performance.
I love going to Daghdha – it has a very special atmosphere (hosted in an old church I’ve spoken about before) . Imagine a big hall with pilars, cosy sofas, armchairs, bean bags and blankets, book shelves, intimate lights and hot tea served.
Jaana spoke about her early training in the Martha Graham‘s dance style, and how she didn’t quite enjoy the experience. This rang a bell to me, I had to study ballet for ten years because one of our neighbours used to run a ballet school. At some point, I even considered the idea of becoming a ballerina. I can’t say I hated it – and it definitely left some traces – I not only love watching dance performances, I also happen to dance now and then around the house .
Jaana didn’t end up being a dancer either – she studied Languages and Philosophy and wrote a PhD thesis about dance from a philosophical perspective. Nowadays she is working with a group doing organisational studies that focus on the role of the body language and body movements in an organisation.
Her talk triggered several ideas and questions in my mind:
She spoke about bodies “moving and being moved” – yes, sometimes we behave as we’re supposed to in an organisation, and our bodies “are moved”, in a way, by the organisation’s rules, by other people’s actions and by social conventions; Jaana also mentioned the gestures and habits we’re inheriting from parents and other family members. But my thoughts went toward massage therapies – how the therapist is moving someone else’s body (osteopaths manipulating joints and muscles), or her own hands on the client’s body, listening to her intuition and trying “to see” where the pain hides.
Moving and being moved – how does this apply to an unconference type event? Just imagine a choreographer looking at a BarCamp event: attendees congregating around the timetable and disappearing into different rooms. The whole interaction in the rooms: one-two speakers, the audience, members of the audience becoming the centre of attention, everybody turning around on their chairs, people discovering old aquaintances in the back of the room and exchanging a smile – what a fascinating “ballet”!
How do people move in a work environment? Are their trajectories relevant? During my observation period in a large open plan full of cubicles, I learnt they are. I went in with the pre-conception that there will be nothing to observe, because people speak to each other mainly through their computers. And I was proved so wrong! People are walking to each other desks to ask a question, to share important news, to suggest a break for a discussion. People stand up to look around and see if someone is at his desk. Some people push their chairs around, some others tend to sit on their colleagues’ desks and make a tour of the team. When someone important is visiting, the rythm and the sound of the whole space is changing.
How is distributed collaboration affected by the lack of movement and space awareness? People tend to assume that their counterpart works in a similar place, in similar conditions- and this is most of the times false! People tend to guess each other’s reactions in call conferences. People in the same room express through gestures unknown to their counterparts. Is a video channel a solution to this? I don’t think so, although it is very useful in some circumstances.
Negative knowledge was another interesting idea brought into discussion: being aware of what you don’t know, being aware of what you sshould avoid doing and of the consequences of not succeeding. Social media seems to have a very important role in raising this kind of awareness: I discover every day things I didn’t know – and wasn’t even aware of their existence! We also tend to know more about actions considered a no-no and about failures due to blogs nowadays.
And today, Jaana, together with Steve Valk and a group of members of the Daghdha Dance Company paid a visit to us in the Interaction Design Centre. It was great to have them around and talk about our work with them. Who knows?! Maybe it’s the beginning of an interesting collaboration!
A frosty afternoon… Nowadays I have to leave the university shortly before 5pm, otherwise it’s too dark to cycle by the Shannon
When I got into town, it was 5:10 – the exact time indicated by one of our colleagues for watching the sky and see Venus and Jupiter next to the New Moon.
The lights of the city and my own clumsiness in using the camera didn’t let me get a perfect picture of what I saw – but this one is nice enough – you can see Venus very clearly on the right bottom part of the Moon! Jupiter was there as well
An explanation of the phenomenon can be found here. I must say I had tears in my eyes because of the cold and I kept wondering if it wasn’t a simple illusion…
In June 2005, I had just started my work on a 
