Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

I keep forgetting to blog about what I write outside this blog. It might be that I have been totally immersed into social software ... Not that I waste my time uploading photos in social networking sites, no no nooo... I waste my time thinking and reflecting on why I upload photos in social networking sites :)

I am not a natural writer so I have to make conscious efforts to sit and write my thoughts. Writing this blog is easy for me because this is a sort of leisure activity, I write about whatever I like or comes to my mind, and I am not bothered about academic rigour at all. But when it is about serious writing I turn to serious mode (and grumpy and anti-social mood.)

When I finished my PhD I was so tired of my thesis I promised myself to never write anything again. But that is a promise no one can keep if one works in academia. And this is how my first paper happened. I was working on a project that had to do with eLearning and eMentoring when a colleague of mine came to my office asking if I could fill a space in the next issue of a journal she was editing. She knew I had just finished my thesis and that it was on the Information Systems field, a perfect fit for her next issue. I broke my promise and said yes. I gathered some sections from my thesis and put them together (that was my Frankenstein version.) I worked on them for a few weeks, transformed them in one (I hope!) coherent paper and submitted it. The final result was a not so ugly discussion about a structuration-based framework (Giddens, Orlikowski) which explained social aspects of software development.

Next paper was a sort of accident as well. I was still working on the eLearning and eMentoring project when my boss came to talk about a conference that was going to take place in the school. She wanted to submit a paper about the project. She had put together some chunks of text from the project bid and from her own thesis, but she needed help. So I had a look at the paper and found a gap where I could contribute. The paper was about language learning in the logistics industry and explained how participants in our project acquired language proficiency through online interactions (i.e., by carrying out eLearning and eMentoring activities). My contribution was an introduction to Online Communities of Practice and Online Pragmatics; and an analysis of online textual interactions by using these theories. We presented the paper in the conference and we were lucky enough that it was chosen for a special issue in a respected academic journal.

After these two accidents I thought that writing serious stuff wasn’t that bad after all. So I decided to be more proactive. About a year ago I wrote a to do list and then I reviewed that list at the beginning of this year. You can see that for six months that list didn’t change that much! Writing is a time consuming task, especially if your job involves other activities which are not directly related to the subject of your writings. But if you are persistent you can see the results… eventually. This is what happened.

Last December, after a few months of work and while working on the VGS project, my ex-boss and I submitted a paper which analysed eLearning and eMentoring processes by using Orlikowski's model of Enactment of Technologies in Practice. (This is a second paper about the eLearning and eMentoring project and has a slight overlap with my first paper). Orlikowski's model is based on Structuration theory, a social theory developed by A. Giddens. In March I got an email from the editors saying that the reviewers had suggested publication but they also had asked for minor changes in a couple of figures. So we did the modifications and a week after I got another email saying that our paper was going to be published. That felt great... almost no corrections. We did all the formatting the publishers asked us to do like for example provide figures in 300x300 dpi TIFF format. I signed the copyright agreement and posted it to singapore. I don't know when it is going to be printed but I hope it will be this year.

I spent the winter weekends writing a chapter for a book about eGovernance and eParticipation. I was supposed to do this at the end of last year, but I couldn't. So I had to sacrifice a few (or a lot!) weekends this year to do this :'( My chapter is a discussion of the nature of online communities (one of my favourite topics) and from that discussion I drew some conclusions on how eGovernance initiatives could make use of common online strategies to improve their rate of success. My point was that online communities success depends on community engagement. That is, members need to be kept interested and satisfied with their participations for the community to survive. That usually happens naturally if they are given the right tools to express themselves. Designers should therefore understand community members' purposes, interests and social dynamics. And that is where the intersection with eGovernance efforts is, as eGovernance is about providing better electronic services and promote citizen participation through online means. I finished that chapter, got feedback from the reviewer and then made a few corrections, like changing the title of the chapter because he didn’t like it! I submitted the final version a month ago and again I am now waiting for this book to be published.

Now I have reached a point where I have to be proactive again. By the way I am not bored or have nothing to do. Quite the opposite. I have a busy job. I am just finishing a 14000 word (maybe longer!) analysis report at work. This report is about requirements and uses for research activity data, and it will be used for the design and implementation of a research information infrastructure. Very interesting by the way, and I think the data I gathered has the potential for a paper in the information systems field. I write about that in my other blog.

A couple of years ago I drafted a paper on Online Research, again based on the methodology I designed for my thesis. Somehow I forgot about that paper, and I thought I had lost it. But I found it again two or three months ago. So now I am thinking on resuscitating it and probably ask someone to co-author with me as I think it needs a new angle.

Another one, 1 friend of mine and ex-colleague, the #awesome guy, has asked me to write with him about social networking. He is a Twitter advocator and I think he liked my previous posts about social networking. This is something I would really like to do, although it will involve some long hours of immersion in the library as I need to catch up with the social software/social media literature.