Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Media, Bryan Kirschner

Sharepoint Learning Kit: Bryan interviews Mike Hines

Bryan Kirschner — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:00:00 GMT

There have been two journal articles lately that have stuck in my head:

First, Brian Fitzgerald writing broadly about the future of open source (“open source 2.0”) in September’s MIS Quarterly argues for the durability of OSS because it can achieve “a balance between a commercial profit value-for-money proposition while still adhering to acceptable open source community values.” Within this flexibility he describes how “the quintessential proprietary software company, Microsoft, can appear to satisfy the definition of an open source company, while a quintessential open source company, Red Hat, can appear to resemble a proprietary software company.”

That in itself is a lot to chew on, especially if you happen to work in the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.

But then Baldwin, Hienerth, and long-time user innovation champion Eric von Hippel published an article November’s Research Policy including discussion of the relationships between high-capital, mainstream manufacturers” and “low-capital, experimental user-manufacturers” in relation to innovation. They conclude that in “design spaces”—markets or products; they use cell phones and PDA’s as an example—that are “relatively easy to expand” the high-capital manufacturers and user-innovators might “co-exist indefinitely.” As I read it, one of the key concepts is the idea of “toolkits” which split the cost of designing an innovation into a capital component (the toolkit) and the designer’s decision—thereby “reducing the time and effort needed to generate new designs” and increasing individual and possibly community capacity for innovation—“rejuvenat[ing] innovation in a design space that was previously deemed to be exhausted.”

(It’s worth pointing out that as far as I have seen, von Hippel has not historically thought of this as applying to software as opposed to physical goods—a source of no end of consternation for me, because I find it to be quite elegant, even inspiring when applied to software and maybe even further to other types of intellectual property—but that’s another blog.)

I subsequently ran across a great example of real-life business and engineering decisions by the Education Products Group at Microsoft that are a fascinating case study to which to apply these two idea. The Sharepoint Learning Kit (SLK) is (in essence) “a toolkit” for Microsoft’s SharePoint2007 designed for teachers that is being released under a Shared Source license.

We’re very pleased to have Mike Hines, a product manager with this group, stop by on his way to BETT 2007 (the Educational Technology Show) come tell us about the engineering, licensing, and business decisions they made, why —and what’s started happening as a result.

In subsequent interviews we will turn the focus on some of the cool technical work being done in community, commercial , and public-sector projects using SLK such as the project he mentions in Kent.

Video: Bryan interviews Mike Hines; Sharepoint Learning Kit

Barry Wellman, SD Clark Professor of Sociology, on Social Network Analysis and Community

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:46:00 GMT

Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0. Open Source 2.0. All the latest expectations for major revs of a good chunk of the information technology world seem to be heavily based on excitement about the possibilities for new forms of social networking and collaboration.

Nobody has more to say about how this can be done right—or wrong—than Barry Wellman.

Dr. Barry Wellman is the S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and is the director of Netlab, a scholarly network studying computer networks, communication networks, and social networks. To quote from an introduction to a tribute event, Barry “pioneered innovative approaches to three fields:

Social network/structural analysis,
Personal community and social support analysis, and
The study of cybersociety (which he calls "living networked in a wired world").”

He has authored 3 books and more than 200 journal articles. He is, to use images from social network analysis, perhaps the biggest “hub” of folks—students, former students, and industry and academic collaborators—who study online and offline communities (including open source communities) there is.

He’s also a really nice guy and was kind enough to take a few minutes to talk with us while he was at the University of Washington’s ISchool talking about “What is the Internet Doing to Community and Vice Versa?.”

Video: Barry Wellman on Social Network Analysis

Wicked Cool Stuff

Bryan Kirschner — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:51:00 GMT

I know I’m running a risk of losing focus on the thread I started on analogy and metaphor, but there’ve been too many things popping up in the last couple weeks. In the interest of focus (and maybe good taste) I decided not to follow up There’s a Vendor in My OSS with “And Now There’s an Oracle in My Pudding” for now. (Yes, that is the title that popped into my head as soon as a I read the news. No, I won’t promise I won’t go there in a future blog.) But I have got to introduce Tammara Combs Turner and the cool stuff she works on, because (a) she just won a national award and (b) she once worked for me. (I claim no contribution whatsoever to the award: I’m simply relieved it is prima facie evidence I didn’t slow her down: in addition to her work and her award, she’s a PhD candidate, an active mentor, and raising two young kids…while I can’t even keep my office clean.)

Tammara is a Program Manager (which doesn’t tell you anything—read Vlad’s entertaining perspective on this, which I share) in the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group. These folks study “computer mediated collective action”—which, as you might imagine, means we talk a lot about things like peer-to-peer technical support and distributed software development….

One of the technologies they offer—free, online, for anybody to use-is NetScan. NetScan is a an analysis and visualization technology for UseNet newsgroups. Below is the UseNet. All of it. Groups are shown as blocks of various sizes while colors indicate growth. It’s a great tool for social network analysis, not to mention idle geek-out amusement (hm, what’s the posting trendline on alt.politics.bush these days?). She wrote a paper all about it here (Picturing Usenet: Mapping Computer-Mediated Collective Action).

Tammara was willing to take some time out of her busy schedule and come to my mess of an office to do an interview with us…

Video: Tammara Combs Turner on Research and Community

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Open Standards, Open Formats, and Open Source: Bryan Kirschner Interviews Alfonso Fuggetta

MichaelF — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:47:00 GMT

Alfonso Fuggetta is a Professor of Software Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in Italy, CEO of CEFRIEL and Faculty Associate for the University of California, Irvine's Institute of Software Research. Among his many activities, Alfonso advises European Policy Makers on Information Technology Issues.

A paper, written by Professor Fuggetta: Open Standards, Open Formats, and Open Source is widely circulated at Microsoft as a helpful guide in thinking about Open Source, Standards and Formats.

In this interview Bryan and Professor Fuggetta discuss his views on Open Source, Standards and Formats as well as why he chose to write this valuable paper.

Video: Bryan Kirschner Interviews Alfonso Fuggetta“”<

Software Dependability with Brendan Murphy, Microsoft Research

admin — Fri, 19 May 2006 17:10:00 GMT

Bryan Kirschner, Research Strategist with the Open Source Software Lab, interviews Brendan Murphy from Microsoft Research. The two look at software dependability on applications, systems & platforms and how errors relate to software design and human oversight.

Video: Software Dependability with Brendan Murphy, Microsoft Research

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