Mel Chua: Hacker. Writer. Researcher. Teacher. Human jumper cable.

Havoc Pennington on open projects: the student’s annotated version

A few gems from Havoc Pennington’s post about open projects. (It’s stuffed with gems. Worth reading all of it to find more.) Highlighting the bits I think may be most useful to students of TOS professors.

First is why you need to think of your FOSS community as something closer to… say, a frat or co-op (probably more like a co-op) as opposed to, say, your department (which is more likely to look like a top-down centralized organization to you).

An open project and its community are the sum of individual people doing what they care about. It’s flat-out wrong to think that any healthy open project is a pool of developers who can be assigned priorities that “make sense” globally. There’s no product manager. The community priorities are simply the union of all community-member priorities.

Then: conflict and the ensuing “mess” is a sign of healthy normalcy. Of course you will want to resolve it, and grow in the process – but conflict avoidance itself is unhealthy. It’s like something a friend once told me about dating: “If you haven’t fought, you’re not in a relationship.” To work closely with people creates friction; it is in moving through that friction that we learn to be a team. See “forming, storming, norming, performing” for more.

As the community grows and new contributors appear, there will be growing pains figuring out how to work together. All projects that get big have to sort out these issues. There will be drama; it’s best taken as evidence that people are passionate.

And for the students who asked me “why I worked on open source and not for a company” (to which I replied “I work on open source for companies”):

My experience is that most “heavy lifting” and perhaps the bulk of the work overall in big open projects tends to come  from commercial interests; partly people using the technology who send in patches, partly companies that do support or consulting around the technology, and partly companies that have some strategic need for the technology (for example Intel needs Linux to run on its hardware). There’s generally a fair bit of research activity, student activity, and hobbyist activity as well, but commercial activity is a big part of what gets done. However, the commercial activity tends to be from a variety of commercial entities, not from just one.

And this is why I’ve found FOSS participation to be an excellent career-growth strategy, especially for the first few jobs. When you work on a project, you’re working alongside folks from multiple corporations, and they can evaluate you as a potential colleague (and you them). When you graduate and have your FOSS porfolio, multiple people from multiple companies can point to your portfolio and say to the hiring manager, “hey boss, I helped make that too.” Validation by existing valuable employee. It’s easier to hire a coworker you already have.

March 27, 2012 – 6:39 pm | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »

Fabulous yellow roman candles

A mish-mash flood of things because I need to clear my mind this morning in order to focus on work. Skip if you want content. Read if you want stream-of-consciousness gushing about what I’ve been up to for the past week.

First of all, I found a community of deaf hearing aid hackers, and I’m floored. They compare peripherals! They write detailed reviews of hearing aids with the sorts of questions and pokings I would ask myself, and ask for and rant about extensible auditory augmentation platforms instead of being spoon-fed. They mess with DAI cables and ask about the hackability of the devices. I asked for advice on my hearing aid selection and got some back; Dr. Krishnan and I will be making the final selection tomorrow, so it’s good stuff to know.

It looks like I’ll end up going the Phonak route. Widex is too expensive for VR, Phonak has stereo DAI, the models we’re looking at for me come in one of those uber-rugged H2O-resistant housings that mean I might be able to hear while running Muddy Buddy (if that’s not an abuse of HAs, I’m not sure what is), and if I want to go the Advanced Bionics route for a CI (cochlear implant) someday they’ll be compatible.

Then. Yesterday was a flood of great conversations. An extended 3.5-hour marathon with Robin about spring and fall and summer plans, which… wow. I have the best PhD advisor ever. It’s also comforting to see that someone as improvisational and cross-disciplinary as me can become an excellent professor (my brain: “ah yes, that’ll work.”) I’m doing crazy stuff and crazy amounts of stuff and she’s not only letting me do that, she’s encouraging (while being watchful of my sanity). I have an idea of my committee now, and we agreed it makes sense for me to do my readiness assessment (“quals”) in the fall, which means I can not overload quite this much with classes in the fall (4 classes + 1 independent study + 2 research projects + student government position for my department + consulting = happy Mel but somewhat hosed.)

I think I’ve figured out my engineering classes; I need to take at least 3 for my degree, and they all need to be related. Psychophysics and Natural Language Processing (NLP, which POSSE alumni Kristina Striegnitz researches; when I take this class you can bet I’ll be asking her for what I can do to help with the associated FOSS toolkit) are both electrical/computer engineering graduate classes, so that’s two.

The third I’ll need to petition my committee to accept; Dr. Alexander asked if I wanted to take his course on hearing aid technologies in the fall alongside all the audiologists-in-training. Once again, I’ll be jumping into an advanced grad-level class in a field I’ve never studied at any level, but I love doing that (so far: qualitative research/sociology, and German) and seem to do exceedingly well with that sort of immersion, so yes. Yes, I do. I may need to tack on an independent study to extend the labs to be more “engineering-ish,” but that shouldn’t be a problem. You can see the theme of how these classes crowd around the “I’m deaf and want to be an articulate oral polyglot; how do I hack this?” area.

I also think I’ve figured out my engineering education specialization, which can mostly be described as “transferring interesting cognition-based techniques from language education into engineering education.” (In other words, I really want to take FLL 575, “Theories of Foreign Language Acquisition.”) It fits in nicely with my focus on “discourse exposure,” as I’m calling it, and my framing of engineering as a culture that students need to learn (and communicate) their way into. All this means I’ll graduate as a somewhat odd PhD. But Robin said she was sort of expecting that. And I think I was, too. It means my post-Purdue job is going to be a ton of fun, and that I’m going to need to create it (but that, too, is nothing new).

I’m in the right department. I have the right advisor. All this is just so right. I’m still lonely in Lafayette, and loneliness tends to lead to me overworking myself (“if I keep moving, I will be useful instead of sad!”) which is why the last week has been a giant breathing pause button thanks to Sebastian being in town. The warm spell meant local ice cream shops were open, so of course we needed to try all of them (that weren’t chains). I also recreated the roasted peppers stuffed in goat cheese we’d enjoyed at the Lebanese restaurant at SIGCSE. Actually, I’d say I improved upon it by mixing smoked chilies and sun-dried tomatoes into the goat cheese (with a bit of yogurt to thin and bind).

We did some data analysis for our research project, and applied for summer jobs, and poked at Teaching Open Source, and did our taxes, and shopped for groceries, and sang along to Sara Bareilles songs on the radio. My life is much more balanced when I have company. And when I came back on Friday from visiting a local couple… the wife is deaf, and they’re both academics, so they built this house a few years ago when they retired and designed it from the ground up to accommodate her: floorplan with clear lines of sight, flashing/buzzing notifications in every room wired to cameras by the front door, pressure-sensitive doormats, a phone with an LCD screen for captions from the relay service, everything – and they travel (yay academics!), and here’s how they work together to make things accessible when they travel, and… I was awed. And I came back from that blinking and wobbly and sorely in need of a hug, and I got one. It’s a weird feeling, watching your future widen up. Realizing that maybe you don’t need to restrict yourself in order to go as far as you’d like, the way narrowing the nozzle of a garden hose makes the spray into a pressurized jet but a needle-thin one. Thinking that okay, maybe if I widen the nozzle, instead of turning the flow into a wimpy spray, more water will gush through and I will have this torrent…

I used to think that in order to do what I wanted to do intellectually and career-wise (and I’ve felt pretty strongly since I was a kid that some sort of intellectual career was my vocation), I would always need to fight to mainstream, spend my days working like a maniac, be alone (and no kids ever), just… all these tradeoffs. Which I was fine with, because you don’t gain anything by standing and sighing wistfully at opportunity cost; if I needed an active life of the mind to be happy, and I could live without the rest, then the choice was obvious, and I was going to be damn happy that way. And I don’t think I’d be unhappy that way, still. But my hypothesis of “you need to vigilantly fight these things always in order to have that which makes you happy!” has been challenged massively these past two years.

Anyhow. Last night also featured the start of an intriguing discussion on religion and truth with Andrew and Stephen (Juntolin, how I love thee) and then a long, long talk with Seb Benthall over at Berkeley, our first chance to converse since we both started grad school, and we just rammed our budding academic selves together full-tilt and marvelled at the overlaps, the differences, the… wow, we really have to figure out how to collaborate, we’re both on 15 bazillion different projects around different-but-related areas, we think and work so differently but in what could shape up to be highly complementary ways… both of us are keenly into open source communities (because we came to academia from them), but I’m education-minded and qualitative and into understanding systems of people, and Seb is quantitative, computational, into building scaleable tools that solve specific problems.

He shows me papers like “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups” and I show him papers like “Hacking In-Person: The Ritual Character of Conferences and the Distillation of a Life-World.” My research is marketing and documentation and context for his research; his research is toolbuilding for my research, or at least that’s how we’re looking at it right now. I introduced him to AIR. He introduced me to the notion of symbolic communities. We looked at proposals for FOSS community metrics dashboards and wondered what tiny experiments would look like – envision the OkCupid blog, except on FOSS communities instead of dating and sex. We are both in the explosively enthusiastic stage of our young research lives, and so are the MIT Media Lab grad students I went to see last week (Natalie and Emily and Ricarose and Jie) and so are my classmates at Purdue and so are… oh, we “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars,” to quote Kerouac.

I thought of all the friends I’ve worked with, argued with, laughed with over the years — the people with whom I stay up all night for intense debate-fueled worksprints, the people with whom I find flow.  I thought of Sally coming over to visit Robin over spring break, thought of Christian staying with Matt when he’d first moved to Allegheny, wondered what it would be like to have those sorts of intellectual collaborations, friendships, years and years and years down the road… how work and research and hacking all intertwine in rich and unpredictable ways over the years, how full and satisfying it must be to look back on that sort of life well-lived when you are older and the narrative of work collaborations wind into this great blossoming ecosystem, how wonderful it is to have begun. A fledgling garden, a stripling forest.

I must make sure I do not overload. I must make sure I breathe. I must make sure I make the tough choice not to max out my capacity at all times so that I can take advantage of these sorts of opportunities. I’m learning how to anchor and to balance in order to fly further up, and… life is grand.

Now to anchor and balance my work, my day, my commitments. What do I want to accomplish today? I’m getting better at this, slowly. Spiral learning.

March 27, 2012 – 9:39 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »

Hearing aid options: down to six choices

March 22, 2012 – 9:12 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | 4 Comments »

Academic blogging workshop: learning goals

Because I need to write them up anyway for class, here are the current learning goals for my workshop on academic blogging — read these in the format of “after the workshop, participants will be able to…” — and as always, comments welcome. Thanks to everyone who wrote back to express interest and sign up! I will reply to you all as soon as I get my 2nd paper in tonight!

1. Analyze and evaluate the online scholarly presence of others.

I want you to be able to find, listen to, and take inspiration from messy realtime online conversations on a topic you’re trying to learn about.

This is both an “analyze” (break into parts and detect how the parts relate to each other and an overall structure or purpose) and “evaluate” (make judgements based on criteria and standards) goal based on Anderson & Krathwohl’s 2001 update of Bloom’s Taxonomy. You will be able to critically assess the quality and usefulness (to you and to others) of someone else’s online scholarly presence because you will be able to deconstruct that presence into multiple elements, determine how that person’s scholarly thought flows between them, and choose which one(s) (if any) work best for specific reading purposes.

• This is an enduring and transferable big idea that pushes students out of the classroom to find value elsewhere; if you are not confined to the resources and circles of your own scholarly institution, your world becomes far larger.
• This is a big idea and a core process at the heart of the practice of radically transparent research. In order to contribute to a conversation, we must first be able to consume it; we must be able to survey the ever-changing landscape of the dialogue of others and assess what we think is “good” and what sorts of examples we may want to emulate and become ourselves.
• This is an often-misunderstood topic because of the high degree of irregularity and chaos present in online conversations that usually get abstracted and edited away in the “formal” scholarly conversations we claim to be used to. The truth is that we have informal scholarly conversations all the time; we scribble in our lab journals, debate with our classmates over lunch, go with confusions to our instructors during office hours… and we are, in all likelihood, far more comfortable with those informal conversations than we are with sitting down and writing formal scholarly papers. Nonetheless, the apparent “chaos” and “noise” in online conversations cause some people to dismiss it as “useless chaff” because they don’t know how to rapidly hone in on the parts that will be useful to them at that moment.
• This is a big idea embedded in the activity of daily reading of a self-selected blogroll, which provides an opportunity to exercise the various directed reading skills that enable you to reach this learning objective.

2. Translate their existing daily scholarly activity into public online artifacts.

I want you to have the courage and habit of exposing your daily thinking as it comes out, without polish, in appropriate venues and in a way that facilitates the creation of more polished pieces down the line.

This is an “apply” (carry out a procedure in a given situation) goal based on Anderson & Krathwohl’s 2001 update of Bloom’s Taxonomy. You will be able to recognize when a content-creation situation is one that could be done “in the open,” and go through the process of “opening it up,” which means finding an appropriate venue, checking relevant permissions, uploading the content, adding any needed context, and pointing others to the public conversation.

• This topic is an enduring and transferable one that centers around students making their existing work visible and valuable to others beyond the classroom.
• It is a big idea and a core process at the heart of the practice of becoming a radically transparent researcher; you’re already a researcher, so what we’re adding here is the radical transparency.
• This is a topic that requires a great deal of uncoverage; academic training specifically conditions us to regard the opposite process (“closed by default”) as normal and intuitive, so we will have to specifically examine and deconstruct this conditioning and discuss when and where each behavior is situationally appropriate.
• This is a topic embedded in the activity of “opening up” individual pieces of our own thinking, which often requires the metacognitive skills of sensitivity to and management of one’s own emotions. (Which is a topic we sometimes don’t like to talk about in academia, particulary in STEM disicplines that are supposed to be abstracted from all that… but fear is an emotion, and quite often the thing that blocks us from moving forward, so we’ll have to tackle that to make any progress on this.)

3. Propose collaborations that combine your existing scholarly momentum with that of others you have never met in person

I want you to have the guts to reach out and make direct connections with other people doing the same, even if you may never have met them in “real life.”

This is a “create” (make new things) goal based on Anderson & Krathwohl’s 2001 update of Bloom’s Taxonomy. A “collaboration proposal” may be anything from a reply tweet to an introduction email to a full-out grant co-authorship — all are invitations to engage at some level. In this case, you will be collaging elements of someone else’s online scholarly presence with your own in order to come up with (and possibly support) the proposal you are making, either explicitly (in an actual proposal format) or implicitly (putting out something they can respond to).

• This big idea is one that will endure for the remainder of your scholarly career; as long as you need to collaborate and network with other scholars, it will serve you well. It is also transfereable to non-scholarly and non-career contexts, since you can use the same sorts of techniques to reach out to more people about your hobbies, interests, and even establish closer contact with old friends and family members (think about Facebook; if you’re an avid Facebook user, you’re probably doing this already, and the question is how to transfer those skills in from that context).
• This is also a core process at the heart of being a radically transparent researcher. The reason others are invested in our transformation into a radically transparent researcher is that it becomes easier for them to participate — at any level, including occasional reading or lurking — in our work. For watchers of our research, the increased ability to connect with you is the entire point.
• This topic is frequently misunderstood from two directions: being “too hard” and being “too easy.” It’s tempting to say that reaching out is “just about meeting people,” and that you can “simply introduce yourself and start saying something,” but this ignores an awareness of the factors that make your introductions more likely to be listened to and followed-up on. It’s also tempting to think that launching yourself out there is intimidating and that nobody’s going to pay attention, but in a way, this is“just” about meeting people, and we’ve been doing that all our lives. We’ll need to play with that duality.
• This topic is embedded in several variants on the activity of reaching out and making connections, which is something we all know how to do from early childhood when we first began making friends. It’s just a different context.

March 22, 2012 – 5:36 pm | engineering edu, teaching open source | 1 Comment »

Bullshitting: a valuable life skill

Sometimes I am terrified by how well I have learned to bullshit. It’s amazing how much energy and a confident attitude can compensate for everything else. Like… preparation. Or facts.

Les and Kelsey decided to tackle the topic of misconceptions in our “Theories of Thinking and Development in Engineering” class by dividing students into teams and having us debate two hypotheses on the same theory on the spot. My team was tasked with arguing that lunar phases were caused by the shadow of the Earth on the Moon. We immediately protested that we knew that was false, how were we supposed to even have a serious debate on that when the other team was tasked with defending what we all knew was the right answer? Les and Kelsey told us to give it a shot anyway.

What the heck, I thought. Why not? So:

1. I’m on Earth.
2. If I see the Moon, it means that it’s in front of me — on the same side of Earth as I am.
3. If it’s night, that means the Sun is behind me — on the opposite side of Earth as I am.
4. I always see the Moon at night.
5. Therefore, the Earth must be between the Moon and the Sun when I see the Moon.
6. The Sun is a light source.
7. The Earth is solid.
8. When a solid thing is in between a light source and another thing, it casts a shadow on the other-thing.
9. What would that look like on the Moon? That’s right, phases.
10. Therefore, phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the Earth.

The other team blinked. Well, that’s… wrong, they said. Phases of the Moon weren’t caused by the shadow of the Earth.  But they weren’t able to prove it on the spot; they’d either never had to work out how lunar phases work, or they’d forgotten the explanation they’d been given. They knew, but they didn’t know. And the hesitation was obvious; they made their argument in a haphazard and floundering manner, with the main point mostly being “because we know it’s true.”

And we did. We all knew my “shadow of the Earth” presentation was utter bullshit. But it was compelling because I delivered it with conviction — and indeed, at the end of our mini-debate, the consensus of our judges was that they knew shadow-of-the-Earth was wrong, but it was argued so convincingly compared to the other side’s “truth” that they had to give us the victory anyway.

It’s an interesting ability to have. It’s something I definitely didn’t have a decade ago; I’m trying to figure out how exactly I picked it up, and I know I’m by no means the only person to have it (nor the best at having it), and that I need to make sure to use this only to accentuate the truth, and not to cover up my own lack of preparation or anything of the sort. But it’s neat to realize I can do that.

By the way, if you’re still wondering how lunar phases work, here you go — but try to figure it out first.

March 21, 2012 – 9:40 pm | engineering edu | 7 Comments »

Piloting a workshop on academic blogging; anyone interested?

I’ve gotten a lot of queries about setting up a web portfolio, etc. lately, so I’ve been hacking on a little workshop series on “web presence for academics.” I’ve turned it into my (CA)Pedagogy project in preparation for a first trial run over Purdue’s 2012 Maymester (May 14-June 8, 2012); if it works it may get folded into the graduate Inquiry class in the fall which is required of all entering students to my department (engineering education).

The workshop will be 4 sessions of 90 minutes each, with up to 2 hours of weekly “homework” assigned after each of the first 3 sessions, though I will scope them so they are minimally completable by most attendees in 1 hour. (I will stick around for an extra hour or two after every session to help those who prefer to get their “homework” done all at once and in person.) There is also pre-work you must do in order to sign up for the workshop, which I estimate will take you 30 minutes to complete. In total, the time commitment is expected be 12.5 hours maximum, 9.5 hours expected, over a 4-week span.

• Session 1 – how do academics use blogging and social media?
• Session 2 – setting up your web presence and making your first post(s)
• Session 3 – using your web presence for citations and networking
• Session 4 – wrap-up

By the end of the workshop, you’ll have a website and a research blog, and you’ll have tapped into the online networks of other academics studying around your topic of interest.

The workshop will be taught in person, but I’m interested in accommodating remotees willing to experiment a bit, either synchronously via attending the in-person sessions remotely, or asynchronously catching up on sessions afterwards; if this sounds like you, please get in touch with me before May 10th, 2012 when you send in your sign-up details.

If you’re interested in participating, email mel at purdue dot edu these 3 things, with a subject line like “Re: your research blogging summer workshop”:

• Name and department
• A 3-sentence summary of your research/study topic(s) or interest(s).
• Links to 5 blogs related to your research/study topic that you find interesting.

You can easily find these by Googling “<topic> blog” – for instance, “sustainable engineering blog” or “middle school teacher blog.” These can be blogs by individuals (academics or not), research groups, departments, organizations, companies — and not every post needs to be about your specific research topic, but the blog’s general theme needs to be about something you find academically interesting. If you’re having trouble finding stuff by searching the web, try http://researchblogging.org/, http://scienceblogs.com/, or the blogs of your professional societies and the things they link to.

Feel free to forward this to others who might be interested – grad students from other departments, faculty, people at other schools. I’ve taught elements of this series at faculty workshops since 2009, so I’m used to the audience — just not the format. I may need to restrict the size/composition of the first group in order to keep things manageable since I’m also working and taking classes at the same time, but I will get everyone who sends the sign-up information in on a second round after the first one’s done, if I end up having to stem the flood in some way.

For those who can’t wait for a preview, my classmate Nikitha is bravely testing out the activities as I come up with them right now, so as I give her (verbal) instructions over the coming weeks I’ll write them into blog posts here as well.

And for those who want to help with the paper I’m supposed to write about the design of all this, any notes you’ve got on why this is interesting to you, or citations pointing to why this is either valuable or difficult for you, would be quite welcome. Some things I’ve already gotten, somewhat paraphrased:

• “I want to get into regular writing as a habit in grad school, and this will give me the accountability I need to get into a rhythm.”
• “I want to expand my research network and connect with projects that I’m interested in, but don’t have a web presence to explain to them what it is that I do.”
• “I keep getting questions from people at conferences about my work and I don’t have a place to refer them to, so I keep answering the same questions over and over.”
• “I want to blog, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything to say.” (I have heard this from everyone ranging from first-year graduate students to senior faculty members considered to be one of the best in their field.)
• “Look at publications on the scholarship of teaching and learning, because they run workshop for practitioners and yours is sort of like that.”
• “Look at curricula aimed at teaching grad students about scholarly communication formats like journal papers and conference posters; this is another format to add to that list.”

March 21, 2012 – 11:13 am | engineering edu, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »

On risk-taking

Written in response to a 2008 group discussion about how our college (Olin) had become “less risk-taking” over the years. Worth reminding myself about occasionally, and relevant to innovation in education and in open source especially as things that were once new and exciting become established projects and procedures, and as the bright-eyed neophytes who pioneered them become old-timers in their turn.

You don’t wait around for things to become “safe to do” and then gripe that the atmosphere isn’t conducive to risk‐taking, because taking a risk means putting yourself in danger in some way. Experimentation and risk‐taking are two different things ‐ you can experiment without taking risks (is an physics lab experiment really risky?) and you can take risks without experimenting (by this I mean you can do dangerous things that don’t add value/knowledge to anyone’s life; there’s probably a better way to phrase this).

I believe that nobody should feel obligated to take any risks they don’t want to, and that you should know ‐ very clearly ‐ what kind of risks you’re taking on when you get into something (and what kinds of risks may remain unknown). This applies to projects, clubs, classes… and colleges.

The fact that you “can’t” try some things out (more accurately: you can’t try some things out without penalties of varying severity) means that you have the ability to take risks. An alternative way to phrase the “Olin doesn’t encourage risk‐taking” complaints in this thread is to say that “Olin doesn’t make the kind of wild experimentation we want to do less risky and more safe.” What do you want?

March 20, 2012 – 8:43 pm | engineering edu, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »

For UNICEF: howto do open research

Some folks at UNICEF asked me to help them articulate a process for how to make their research projects (usually “is this program we want to do a feasible one?” or “what was the impact of this program we did?” into open content ones. Here’s what I wrote them back.
There are some pretty basic things that a researcher can do to make their work into an open content project. Here are a few.

1. Radical realtime transparency. Release all work in an editable format under a creative commons license as soon as it’s made. I’ll elaborate on each of those points in a bit more detail:

1a. Release all work. This means not just the finished/polished products, but the rough drafts, the incoherent notes, and the random scribblings as well. You can put disclaimers of “these are the rough things” at the top, and you don’t need to do announcements of the release of all your low-level work (except in weekly summaries) but they will let other people dig as far as they could possibly want to go on your activity in the space.

1b. In an editable format. No pdfs — wiki pages, plaintext in a version control repository, something Word (or better yet, .odt) files are marginally acceptable, but force you to become a merging bottleneck; it’s best to get as close as possible to people being able to edit not just the material, but also each other’s edits, themselves.

1c. Under a creative commons license. Use the same license as the final paper. I noticed you chose the CC-BY-SA license, which is good; the key point is to avoid the “noncommercial” and “no derivatives” restrictions, which are the non-open creative commons license variants. Remixability for all purposes is vital.

1d. As soon as it’s made. This means what it sounds like; push it as you do it, not after the fact as “background material” accompanying the finished paper. If you want people to help you along your journey, they need to know as accurately as possible where you are right now.

2. Make work findable. Have a central place where people can easily read the current status of the project in 1 minute or less, and where they can quickly navigate to all the materials you’ve created for it. The specific structure/format isn’t as important as having a clear structure to begin with; pick a schema and stick with it.

3. Make participation as low-barrier as possible. Whenever possible, don’t require logins or account creation. If you must use authentication of some sort, think about what accounts the people you want as collaborators are already likely to have (facebook? twitter/identi.ca? wikipedia? github?) and what platforms they’re already likely to be familiar with (do they know version control? word processing? English?) and in general try to make it possible for someone to go from “stumbled across your project” to “made a contribution” in as few seconds and clicks as possible.

4. Update in a regular rhythm. Weekly is usually good, but for some projects it may make sense to cycle more quickly or slowly. For those who need a rule of thumb, I’ll semi-arbitrarily say that you should have at least 5 updates throughout the life of your project, so a 2-month project might have weekly updates, a 2-week project would have daily updates, a 1-day project might have hourly updates, but a 1-year project might have bimonthly updates (though weekly updates will drive more participation). Pick a schedule, announce it, and stick to it; this is something that should be on the front of your “participation” homepage (from #2, “make work findable”) so that new people coming in know when the “next thing” is coming up that they can jump in on.

5. Reach out in backchannel to bring people to the public space. Email, go to conferences, tweet/dent, blog, sit down at coffee shops, go to marketplaces… go where the people are, and engage with them in their spaces as long as it takes for you to help them feel comfortable coming to yours. Basically, private conversations are necessary, but they’re necessary as a means towards the end of bringing people into a public and collaborative space. It’s like opening a new physical location for something like a bar or a library; you want everyone to end up in your space interacting with each other, so you go out and have individual conversations with them aimed towards getting them there.

Hopefully these are useful as general rules/constructs to follow — glad to help with specific implementation questions as things come up. If the first few projects doing this go well, we can go back over them as case studies and figure out a v.2.0 of the approach based on those experiences, which would be exciting.

One thing I haven’t addressed here (and don’t know the UNICEF practices around) is IRB — since you’re dealing with human subjects, particularly during interviews and site visits/observations, how do you get consent from those people to publish their data (and since so many of the people you work with are children, how do you get consent from their legal guardians as well)? Do you have an internal IRB, or work with IRBs from other institutions? This is much less of a consideration when you’re doing fieldwork only for private/personal knowledge and to inform a project, but if we’re making data public on the internet, that constitutes a form of publishing, and we need to make sure we’re doing the right thing in terms of consent and privacy and making sure people know what that means.

March 19, 2012 – 9:30 am | engineering edu, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »

youth is not a state to be preserved but a state to be transcended

Reading this morning in preparation for a Rolfing session, the following passage stuck out at me.

Youth is not a state to be preserved but a state to be transcended. Youth has strength, but it does not have skill, which, in the long run, is the most potent strength. Youth has speed, but it does not have efficiency, which, in the long run, is the only effective way of obtaining goals. Youth is quick, but it is not deliberate, and deliberation is the only way to make correct decisions. Youth has energy and intelligence, but it does not have the judgment necessary to make the best use of that energy and intelligence. Measured judgment in the end, is the only guarantor of intelligent behavior.

Youth has the beauty of genetic endowment, but it does not have the beauty of real achievement. Youth has the glow of promise, but it does not have the radiance of accomplishment. Youth is a time of seeding and cultivation, but it is not a time of fruiting and harvest. Youth is a state of ignorance and innocence, but it is not a state of knowledge and wisdom. Youth is a state of emptiness awaiting fullness, a state of possibility awaiting actualization, a state of beginning awaiting transcendence.

In short, youth is a state to be put behind us as we grow taller and deeper and fuller… an explosive yearning to grow taller and deeper and fuller and transcend oneself.

(from the book Somatics by Thomas Hanna)

I have identified so long with being the young person, the small one, the little sister among my older (and largely male) friends and colleagues, that this is the sort of thing that I still struggle with. It is possible to be less experienced but still an adult, maturing but already somewhat mature; cognizant of how much farther one has to go but still recognizing how far one has come. And people have been trying to tell me, and it’s true: I have come quite far already, and I should recognize and build on that instead of starting forever from scratch as a tabula rasa (while still maintaining that beginner’s mind and that open readiness).

It may be time to ratchet down the things I’m doing, gradually, so that I have time to think and breathe again. (Challenge: don’t get restless and bored.) Thank goodness summer’s on the way.

March 16, 2012 – 7:30 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

tired lanky joyousness

A million things have happened in the past 5 days, and I haven’t written about them. And I’ve decided, just now, not to feel guilty about that. Plenty for my future self to write about; the happenings will trickle out as I write out the projects they affect. And I’ll be writing when I’m back in Indiana; one thing that came from talking with Heidi a few days ago was the insight that my prolific wordsmithing probably stems from a sort of loneliness — the people who I need to share and workshop my ideas with will never be sufficiently concentrated in my in-person location, so the internet becomes the only place where we can keep the constant contact needed for those sorts of conversations.

But this week I am in Boston, and it is wonderfully comfortable, wonderfully… I know that this city is no longer my home, but it’s the closest place I’ve ever had to one. My friends are here, I have family here, my colleagues are here, the highest concentration of people working in “my area” (in some sense of the word — not by methodology or training or particular manifestation of practice, but by the domain of open source and education and with a certain mindset toward it) are here.

On Friday night I found myself sprawled on the floor of Hari’s room, belly full of ice cream, lolling half on an unrolled exercise mat that Hari had tossed me for comfortableness++,  him and Elsa firing social_life++ ideas to me after I’d expressed confusion as to how one went about building friendships in Indiana, which I am apparently not good at — all my friendships come through work, and grad school work has so far been overwhelmingly individual. Sprawled on the floor of someone’s room, staring at the ceiling, not worrying about looking stupid, feeling comfortable, feeling part of the flow; hanging out with Hari had been a random text message, Elsa had come by because Hari banged on the window as she passed outside, no agenda, just… friends.

Sunday evening I got sucked into an impromptu swing dance lesson (co-taught with Zach) in much the same way, then Jeff hijacked me for a Cabot’s trip on the way to pika dinner with Matt, after which we talked until I fell asleep on his futon. Monday night was a long, long, multi-topic conversation with Heidi out in Springfield; I went back to Worcester this morning to hang out with Karl, then took Melanie on her first college tour (Wellesley — interesting new perspectives!) and had dinner with Liz. I don’t remember what evening it was when Brett, Ivy, and Sebastian got me playing Halo for the first time in about 4 years up in Brett’s room (where I proceeded to be a terrible liability to anybody I was partnered with as I scrambled to relearn how to use weapons and shoot things), but that was fantastic too. Saturday, maybe. Saturday night? Too many things to hold onto. Too many thoughts in brain. Too many — they will slip, I will forget, I need to make sure to do things I need to do.

I’m jumping around in time here. Tuesday afternoon was Dee and Deb, and Wednesday morning was presenting the open access policy proposal at Olin’s faculty meeting (went well, more work to do now) and got sucked into delightful conversations along the way — I2E2 with Sharon, engineering education geekery with Jon… Laura had an admissions tour group starting as I walked out of Susan’s office (because every Olin trip must contain a Susan hug) and I sat down and answered questions for a little while. Being able to swing by to see Sebastian for a few minutes on my way back to my aunt’s house and get a real good-night hug, and to have that sort of tiny casual thing be possible, that little luxury we’ve never been able to take for granted. Monday morning meeting at WGBH before I hit the road, two breakfasts at the Miss Woo diner car in Worcester because I wanted to try their (amazing) pancakes. Conversations with my aunt, summer planning with Melanie, seeing Audrey asleep at night when I come in to sleep on the air mattress on the floor (how did she grow up so fast?) and knowing that tomorrow I will see more people, be able to improvise.

That’s a lot of it. In this city, I can improvise much faster and farther from a base here than in anywhere else in the world. I know it well, I know the people well, I know the patterns and the rhythms and they fit into and extend what I do. I’m in the midwest for skill-honing, thought-training, tool-sharpening… but the places I want to apply it and the people I want to apply it with are far too often out East here. So I work, and I wait, and I work some more, and I try to make friends, and I build my network (though that sounds way more calculating than the actual “wait that looks shiny I am now excited!” stuff that actually happens in my brain) and I soak up what I can joyously during the rare moments I can be here.

I appreciate Boston far more when I don’t live in it, I am sure. I have been lonely here as well. I don’t imagine that doing data collection here, or a postdoc here, or even moving back out here will magically solve all my problems and make me deliriously happy.

But this visit has made me very happy. I’m exhausted, run ragged, doing the sleeping thing extremely early tonight; I’m terribly behind on everything, but I am happier than I’ve been all semester, maybe all school year. Just the past six days. Because it’s been constant flow and constant fit, constant friends, comfortableness, belonging. I miss that feeling terribly, and I know that I’ll feel its absence when I go back.

Someday, perhaps, I will read this and laugh at the rootlessness in my writing. I wonder what this will look like from the other side of that transformation, if I ever get there. And if I ever have a student or a mentee or a kid who has the wanderlust burn in their veins, I hope they’ll see this sort of thing and know that I drank (and possibly still do drink) from that flaming pool myself. I’m not all polished and coherent thought and manic work-output; I also spill out in a sort of tired lanky joyousness, and then I do collapse and go to sleep.

I think my fingers have run out of brain. I’ll flop upstairs on the air mattress now.

March 15, 2012 – 9:56 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »