New home
Coniecto got a new home, and we’ll be moving here soon. Until then, you can keep an eye on the old blog.
July 08 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
On my way to ICSE
One more hour to spend in Dublin airport before my flight to Germany. I’m going to ICSE, the most important conference for the field of software engineering. I’ll attend two workshops:
– STC – Socio-Technical Congruence – on Saturday, and
– CHASE – Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering – on Tuesday.
I’ll also present our work at CHASE, and I’m pretty excited by the format suggested by the organisers, which will give us the chance to interact with the other participants. It looks like this workshop attracted 60 participants and it’s one of the biggest this year.
The main conference will happen from Wednesday until Friday.
I’m looking forward to the event and excited to visit the place where my favourite baroque composer has spent a good part of his life!
May 09 2008 | conferences and Software engineering and travel | No Comments »
Panel discussion on Social Networking at the University of Limerick
It’s been months since myself and Micheal O hAodha have discovered we share an interest in social networking and decided to organise an event on this topic at our university. We started with the idea of a presentation in mind, but as the date kept on slipping , the concept changed, in an attempt to make the event more lively and interactive.
Taking advantage of my collaboration with Bernie Goldbach (@topgold) and James Corbett (@EirePreneur) in bringing to life the next BarCampIreland, I thought of inviting them for a discussion panel.
The announcement went out to the university Events mailing list:
You are invited to the panel discussion“Social Networking – Getting Beyond the Hype”in the Library Board Room, Friday 11 April, 2008, 2-3 pm.The panel will touch on the variety of existing online social networking opportunities (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, MySpace etc.). But instead of insisting on the potential advantages/disadvantages of social networking as sometimes outlined in the mainstream media, the panelists intend to share insights from their own experience with blogging and micro-blogging as instruments for building social interfaces, networking through “social objects” (like photos, bookmarks, references) and the numerous face-to-face events facilitated by the use of online applications.Panelists:
- Micheal Ó hAodha –Librarian (College of Science and Engineering-ECE,CSIS,MAE,MOE), UL – Moderator
- Gabriela Avram – Researcher, Interaction Design Centre, UL
- Bernard Goldbach – Lecturer, Tipperary Institute of Technology
- James Corbett – Entrepreneur and social media consultant, EirePreneur
And here’s a wiki page dedicated to the event.
So, if you’re around Limerick this Friday, you are more than welcome to join us!
April 08 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Irish Blog Awards 2008
This year, I made it! After only 3-4h of sleep per night in the last two weeks, a bit of extra sleep over the week-end would have been highly appreciated. But I decided to stretch myself a bit more, jumped on the Dublin bus at 12:30 on Saturday (the price of a one way train ticket is prohibitive!) and made it to both events:
– the Ladies’ Tea Party at the Market Bar
– the Irish Blog Awards 2008 at the Alexander Hotel.
I had to go to bed around 11, because my crazy plans didn’t end here. This morning I took the Aircoach to Cork at 6am, and here I am.
More on the Dublin events later!
March 02 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Limerick social media meetup scene
Not only that we have an Irish blog week 2008, but now we have a social media social life here in Limerick as well!
On Jan 19, we met for an exquisite Blogger Coffee Limerick at the Marriott, thanks to Alexia Golez;
I blogged about it that very afternoon, but the gods of Internet were against it, and the post disappeared without a trace. (Don’t get me started on Mercury retrograde and stuff like that!)
This Thursday, Feb 7, we had the first Limerick OpenCoffee in 2008; as usual, the Absolute Hotel was the venue. Bernie Goldbach and James Corbett took care of the organisation – again, as usual. An interesting mix of people attended, and after a round of introductions and discussions on the format and a possible alternative venue for the future events, I had the chance to talk to a few people (and get a few very useful tips!)
The next one is planned for the first Thursday in March, 11am, in the Absolute. We hear that a website for Irish Open Coffee is cooking, and there’s already a blog titled Cork OpenCoffee – but reporting on similar events across the whole island.
There’s a Jaiku channel for it, and a calendar of the forthcoming events is available.
And now Anton Mannering is bringing the TechLudd to Limerick on February 21. Venue: the George Hotel. Can’t wait, especially because I couldn’t go to Dublin on the 24th of January and missed the first event of the series!
Aren’t we spoiled?!
Update: wiki created at wikispaces.com for Irish OpenCoffee, with the intent of making dates and topics of future events visible across the island and allowing for input and feedback.
February 10 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The economics of conversations
The following quote comes from Jay Deragon‘s blog The Relationship Economy, but I first got it via the Value-Networks Google Group mailing list.
I deeply resonated with this:
“The best approach to leveraging the social web is to understand the systemic nature of peoples interest, desires and needs: a relationship. Connecting the dots requires a conversation, not just a connection. What say you?”
Finally someone tells corporations that becoming involved in social networking just because it is trendy and without changing their attitude will not pay off!
Markets are conversations… and they will never ever again reverse to corporate monologues!
January 10 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
A Jaiku-born exchange
On Thursday we had a very nice exchange with a group of Creative Multimedia students from Tipperary Institute of Technology…
All started a few good weeks ago, with Bernie Goldbach following the Jaiku channel I use with my students (Bernie recalls jaikus about Marshall McLuhan received on his mobile phone while he was walking his dog:)- must have been that “toaster as medium” thingie!).
In October, I finally made it to an OpenCoffee in the Absolute Hotel and met Bernie in person. Not before spamming him with a Shelfari invite the night before:(
Photo by topgold
Still frustrated because I missed the EduCamp in June and the PodCamp in September, I invited Bernie to give a talk on podcasting to my students. Bernie thought of bringing some of his students along – and I was enthused about this!
And then all happened on Thursday – Bernard spoke to the UL+TippInst students about podcasting, jobs and entrepreneurship, asked his students to talk about their own work and encouraged the audience to ask questions. The students were a bit shy in the beginning, but when he invited them to have a look at his podcasting gear, most of them couldn’t resist the temptation and the ice was broken. The two groups of students had the chance to mingle for a few minutes afterwards!
After the lecture, the TippInst students visited the IDC, where Liam Bannon gave them a briefing on the Interaction Design Centre and our way of looking at technology, and Lui spoke about previous and current IDC projects. The visit finished with the grand tour and a closer look at some of our “reliques” – the Shannon Portal, the recipe pyramid…
It was an interesting exchange and I have the feeling we all learned from it!
Some opinions of my students on the event can be read on the Jaiku channel!
Note: A more formal version of this post was published on the IDC blog previously.
December 02 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
BlogTalk 2008 in Cork, Ireland
In case you haven’t heard yet, the next BlogTalk will happen in Cork, Ireland on 3-4 March 2008 – “continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software community.”
The conference chairs are John Breslin and Thomas N. Burg , having Tom Raftery and Jan Schmidt as co-chairs.
The full call for proposals is available here, and the deadline for submitting proposals has been extended until December 7, 2007.
Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks are among the invited speakers.
There’s a colocated WebCamp on Social Network Portability scheduled for the day before, March 2 2008.
As a member of the organising committee, I should have blogged about this long time before. But as always, I’m madly busy at work and can’t find enough time for the things I love doing!
Shame on me:(
November 27 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
About privacy, user options and spam
I got back home today and found an invitation from a friend to join Shelfari, supposedly a social network service for book lovers.
I recently heard about Bookmooch and I had a look at it without joining. But this afternoon, in between cooking dinner, cleaning my apartment and chatting to my daughter, I decided to give Shelfari a try.
I never liked this kind of shortcut in finding out who else is on that network (giving them your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail username and password), but until now – with all my bad feelings about giving someone free access to my mailbox – nothing bad ever happened. But there’s a start for everything…I discovered a few friends were already using it and opted for connecting to them, but I specifically de-selected all the other people on my contact list. Pressed “send”, and – SURPRISE! – few minutes later I discovered the invitation WAS SENT to everyone on my contact list… Mailing lists, former students, former co-workers, a few blogs – all got it!
Two minutes later, a friend emailed warning me it happened to her as well and I went in, deleted my account .and started apologizing to people …
A bit of a search on Technorati showed me that it happened to others as well…
That doesn’t make it less embarrassing though:(
If you got the Shelfari message from me, please note that I don’t recommend it…unless you think you can handle the odd interface!
October 30 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The ICGSE in Munich
My paper made it into one of the most important conferences in our field, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, that happened in Munich between 27 and 31 August.
On Monday, I went to a tutorial on SNA- Seeing inside: Using social network analysis to understand patterns of collaboration and coordination in global software teams offered by Kate Ehrlich and Giuseppe Valletto from IBM Research. It was great to meet Kate in person after collaborating with her in drafting a project inside IBM! (The project never took off, but it was great to work with Kate and learn from her!)
During lunch, I made a terrible faux pas when I sat down at the same table with Phillippe Kruchten who was in the middle of his lunch. I read his name tag and as my excitment was bursting, the only line I could find after “Hello, nice to meet you!” was: “we’re reading your papers!” He was very nice answering: “and I’m reading your papers too! I had to read all the 100+ submissions…” The truth is I had discovered one of his papers only the week before, and it served me very well to make a point in my ECKM’07 paper, so for me it was a wonderful coincidence and all I meant was to thank him… but then I made a complete fool of myself!
My colleague Anders introduced me to Frances Paulisch, the host and the good fairy of the conference. Frances introduced me to Daniela Damian (again, what a difference between exchanging emails and talking on Skype from being face-to-face!) Daniela introduced me to some of her students – I remember meeting Sabrina Marczak on that occasion.
A welcome reception at the Hilton City Munich followed on the same evening.
On Tuesday, instead of a keynote, there was an opening session including “two important papers”-as introduced by the organisers. Their topics – text-based communication in distributed requirements workshops and respectively the relationship between time zone separation and performance – were of great interest and therefore they were vividly discussed by the audience during the following breaks.
An Experience session, containing only papers from the industry, followed.
Before introducing the keynote speaker, Phillipe Kruchten presented some statistics: there were 100 submissions, out of which 29 were accepted; 156 participants were 60 from
Then “Herr Professor Doktor” Erran Carmel delivered his keynote speech, “Reflections on a Decade of Studying Global Software Engineering“.
A poster session followed – only 3 posters were presented, and unfortunately the Irish IBMers who were co-authors of one of them couldn’t be there. Kate Ehrlich and Prof.Marilyn Tremaine had to stand next to it, explaining the work that had been done.
Sabrina Marczak from PUCRS, and a group of students from TU Munich(under the supervision of Marilyn Tremaine) were the authors of the other two.
In the afternoon, we had a session dedicated to Quality and Performance. Two very different talks. Rajesh Agarval from TCS presented the solution found by his company for motivating their developers to work as quality engineers as well. The other speaker was Timo Poikolainen from Nokia – and again, the audience had the chance to hear about successes and failures with thorough openness, as always when someone from Nokia is giving a presentation.
The session organized for students in the evening included two parts:
– In the first part, J.Sauer from Hamburg University presented the results of a survey he has undertaken on the particular difficulties of research in the GSE domain. It was interesting to listen to the student introductions – it gave you an idea of the differences between research settings in different countries.
– In the second part, Harold Ossher from IBM Watson introduced the Jazz Technology platform. Jazz is the result of a collaboration between IBM Rational and IBM Research and is attempting to build a team collaboration platform on top of the Eclipse IDE. Jazz.net – not yet open to the public; a few videos available. Two related research projects based on jazz were presented: one from Victoria University and the other one from University of California, Irvine.
And then the banquet, at the Ratshaus Keller. A lot of nice food and drinks, a magician going around and entertaining people, socializing and networking, and lots of fun.
On Wednesday, it was my turn, and I was extremely nervous. The session was titled Communication, and I was in very good company: Matt Bass from SEI-CMU (actually from Siemens!), and Luis Izquierdo, from the University of Victoria. Luis’s paper was extremely interesting – his methods were also inspired by ethnography, and his field site very similar to ours.
I oscillated between a classical presentation and an unusual one. In the end, I couldn’t resist the temptation – I went for the unusual one. I started with a warning – no figures nor tables in my presentation!
I don’t know what was the impact at the conceptual level – if I managed to convince the audience how important social practices and human actors actually are in a global environment!, but probably my little SouthPark characters have made quite an impression!
On Wednesday afternoon, I had the chance of presenting to the steering committee the Lero proposal of organising ICGSE 2009 in Limerick.
Thursday, the last day of the conference, was shorter.
In the morning, the announcement was made that ICGSE 08 is going to take place in Bangalore, India, and ICGSE 09 in Limerick, Ireland.
In the first session, Michael Vax from LUXOFT delivered the keynote speech, substituting his boss who couldn’t come because of visa problems.
The keynote was followed by an Experience session: Subita Sudershana from Roche Molecular Systems (very energetic talk, including stories of miscommunication with both parts speaking English!) , Viktor Clerc from VU Amsterdam, and Alexander Boden from University of Siegen.
The final session was dedicated to Processes and chaired by Daniela Damian. Alberto Avritzer from Siemens Corporate Research presented the Global Software Studio 3.0 project. Our own university was involved in the first and second year in this project, so it was interesting to see how it evolved in the next stage. Fausto Fasano spoke about an experiment on code inspection, while the final presentation (Rafael Prikladnicki from PUCRS) examined different offshoring and onshoring strategies.
It was a very interesting for me to meet in person so many academics and practitioners involved in GSE research. As I said, I was reading their papers, but didn’t have any perception of their personalities.
And it was good to see who does the same kind of work in the GSE community. I found a lot of connections with the work of people in Daniela Damian’s group (Luis Izquierdo, Sabrina Marczak) and with Alexander Boden’s research – clearly grounded in CSCW. Let’s hope we can cook a workshop or tutorial together for next year!
I must confess I was very anxious during the conference: we seem to worry a bit too much as a group that our work won’t be well seen by hard core software engineers, who are obviously preferring quantitave studies and experiments to our “soft” qualitative and interpretive approach. The conference proved to me that the community is ready to listen to what we have to say, and we can actually make an important contribution complementing those quantitative approaches.
My ego got nicely massaged on several occasions; for example, Alberto Avritzer greeted me on the first day as we would have known each other – just to find out before the end of the conference that he was reading my blog from time to time! Frederick Zarndt commented at the end of my presentation (with shining eyes and a big smile on his face) that he had experienced as a practitioner all the situations mentioned in the presentation. Frederick gave a tutorial on the first day on “intercultural expectations, misunderstandings and communications” that I unfortunately missed. And then, there was a very touching scene in the lobby on the last day, when a young lady (a Brasilian student volunteer) came to tell me in her hesitant English: “When I’ll grow up, I would like to be like you!”
In conclusion, the conference in Munich was a very rewarding experience – and it was followed by a short vacation. Here’s my Flickr set from the conference and the one from the cycling tour of Munich on Friday!
September 01 2007 | Events and GlobalSD and ICGSE07 and Munich | No Comments »