The JP Allen Blog

The dynamic team of Steve Sawyer, Julie Rennecker, and myself pulled off another successful meeting of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 9.1, immediately after the ICIS 2009 conference in Phoenix. We went for a conversational format in small groups, rather than a barrage of presentations, and the participants agreed it was a winner.

You can see the high quality line-up of speakers and abstracts at our workshop website, available here.  (If anyone wants to know the pros and cons of building with Google Sites, I have some opinions…)

Looks like we’ll go for another post-ICIS workshop in St. Louis next year.

I gave two Instructional Technology talks recently, one formal and one spontaneous.

The formal one was a presentation to our USF Wikis and Blogs group on “Pro Blogging for Dorks Academics”. I talked about the main tradeoffs I see for academic blogging:

• The personal vs. professional balance
• The person vs. topic focus

I also talked about why academic blogging has been valuable for me:

• Self-expression – the usual reason to blog, but looking back over a year’s worth of posts, categories, topics and tags gives you a new perspective on your interests. Writing practice doesn’t hurt either.
• Republishing – I’ve had at least one example of a conference paper that was translated and published in a journal, after it was found on the blog.
• Connections – I’ve met people with similar interests, both academic and professional, that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. My biggest success was finding the designer of a web site I had used in a teaching case, with zero additional work on my part. I posted my case, and within 24 hours the designer, who I had never met before, left a comment with great behind-the-scenes information about the site.
• Media – I’ve had reporters find me through my blog, which can be good or annoying. I showed a recent example where my analytics data told me a reporter had spent almost half an hour on my blog before contacting me for an interview. That information gave me confidence this person was serious, and worth giving some time to.
• Explaining publications – hey, academic publications don’t make sense to a lot of people basically everyone, including people who might be able to use your findings. Blog posts give me the chance to explain publications and presentations in somewhat normal language.
• The living CV – I’m not sure if this is good or not, but I seem to do many things that wouldn’t make it to my academic CV.  The academic blog is a place to capture those. It’s great for those end-of-year reviews, promotion cases, and to quickly introduce others to my work and interests.

Two days later, I gave a spontaneous show-and-tell on my Moodle site (university.jpedia.org) that I use instead of our official Blackboard product. USF is considering Moodle as an alternative, but it will be another classic example of selling the unfamiliar benefits of open source to an institution that has spent serious time and energy on the proprietary path. In industry, open source can sneak in the back door on new projects, and gradually take over from within. Ripping out the existing system is a tougher sell, without some vision of the long-term innovation benefits.

Does our Information Technology match our values? That’s not a question you typically hear companies asking. They usually ask: does the technology match my business and technical requirements?

Requirements are the right way to think about technology needs, the argument goes, because requirements are objective, consistent, and can be ‘frozen’ to prevent changes. If someone were crazy enough to base technology decisions on an organization’s values, it would be doomed to failure, because values are fuzzy, changing, and usually self-contradictory.

But what if values are the bedrock that doesn’t change, while requirements come and go?  Or, what if our attempts to define away conflicting values as ‘fixed’ requirements just don’t match reality?  Can we find practical ways to accommodate differences between values (deeply-held beliefs about priorities) and goals (the temporarily negotiated requirements that allow work to continue) that do not go away?

I’m working on a new project with Karin Hedström at the Swedish Business School, Örebro University on how to cope with technology values in a practical way. She’s written extensively on technology values in health care, where values like quality care, administrative efficiency, and medical records security battle for supremacy in a very messy and complicated environment. I’m writing about the openness vs. accuracy tensions in new web communities such as wikipedia, where the technology builds in support for discussing how to resolve value conflicts.

Karin and her PhD student Ella Kolkowska were in San Francisco last week as Visiting Scholars at USF. It was wonderful having them here. Thanks to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) for sponsoring their visit.

Our paper on Web 2.0 and Social Informatics has now been published in issue #8 of the Journal of Social Informatics (JSI). JSI happens to be an online magazine published by the West University of Timisoara in Romania.

How’d it get there?

Simple: global ambition meets free global publishing. A university somewhere in the world decides to make a name for itself in a specialized niche they consider up-and-coming (in this case, Social Informatics). They start an online journal. They search the web for content. They find entry #17 on the J.P. Allen Blog, and the rest is history.

Another strategy for universities looking to make their mark on the world is to build a high-quality information portal. I fired up my google analytics yesterday and saw, for the first time, a visitor referred by a site called social-informatics.org. I clicked, and was surprised to find myself at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The good ol’ U of L has put together a quality information source on Social Informatics that I had no idea existed. And I’m not just saying that because they link to my blog! The publishing houses and established universities might own the big name journals, but what’s to stop a university on the other side of the world from having the premiere web destination for an academic topic?

Thanks to a humble blog, and free analytics, Romanians now know that Web 2.0 este un obiect de studiu important pentru cercetarea sistemelor informationale. And Slovenians can find out how to get people to invest in emerging technologies.

The newly-released book Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion looks at how positive visions of the future convince people to invest in, adopt, and use new technologies. For many emerging technologies, rational arguments and financials aren’t enough, because of the uncertainty. At some point, there has to be a leap of faith. But how does this leap of faith happen?

My chapter, “Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies,” is a study of more than 2,500 articles published over a 10 year period, to see how companies in the once-hot Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) space convinced themselves to make big investments in the technology.

Through arguments with colorful names such as new mass markets, killer features, inevitable progressions, bundling together, and the ever-popular horse race, 34 of the leading companies in computing, telecom, and consumer electronics convinced themselves to make major PDA investments, though most were soon abandoned. When success didn’t materialize as quickly as they hoped, they used variants of these arguments to rationalize their failures.

The chapter includes two short case studies of companies that were able to successfully resist the prevailing rhetoric of the day, and how they did it. The British PDA maker Psion managed to resist the craze for ‘pen-based computing’, while the American company Palm resisted the conventional wisdom of phone-based ‘communicator’ PDAs with their own vision of a ‘connected organizer’.

(Added 6/23/08)  A nice review of the book here that mentions the chapter.

I’m pleased to present the paper lineup for the Social Theory in Information systems Research (STIR) track at the AMCIS (AMericas Conference on Information Systems) 2007 conference. For the past five years, my fellow track chairs and I have tried to bring together an international mix of research that shows how social theory, and social research methods, are useful for answering questions about the future of information technology.

This will be my final year as part of the STIR management team. If you are interested in becoming a track co-chair, please contact me or my colleagues Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf at Indiana University.

The 2007 STIR papers:

• “Examining Alignment of Frames Using Actor-Network Constructs: The Implementation of an IT Project”, by Bijan Azad (American University of Beirut) and Samer Faraj (University of Maryland).
• “A Realist Social Theory of Information Systems”, by Michael Cuellar (Georgia State University).
• “Mediated Interaction: Social Informatics in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing”, by Hamid Ekbia (Indiana University).
• “Understanding Online Community Effectiveness: The Efficacy of Integrating Group Development and Social Capital Theories”, by Roderick Lee (Penn State University).
• “Internet Use from the Perspective of the Theory of Planned Behaviour”, by Johann Kerschbaum (University of Vienna), Elisabeth Donat (Donau-Universität Krems), and Roman Brandtweiner (Donau-Universität Krems).
• “Web 2.0: A Social Informatics Perspective”, by me (USF), Howard Rosenbaum (Indiana University) and Pnina Shachaf (Indiana University).

A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.

We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.

While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.

When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.

The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.

It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.