Prior to the use of information technology and communications networks, groups that wanted to work together needed to work physically together in the same location. This fact held even when I started my career.

When I worked in the defence industry in the late 80’s all work happened either in-person or over the phone. When we got some PCs, we put them all in a lab, and used them to print status reports that we would pass around. Most of my working day involved hand-written documents and drawings that I would either hand-carry, or intraoffice mail them around in those manilla envelopes with holes in them.

When I went to graduate school, we used e-mail and e-mail lists. I attended research groups in person, and most significant work, such as my thesis, were reviewed and marked-up in paper form. Still, a significant amount of less-formal work happened over e-mail. My research group was spread across the campus, so e-mail was quicker than walking.

At the same time, largely as a diversion, I would spend part of my day on Usenet newsgroups, mainly following my musical interests. Usenet groups were some of the first virtual communities. While much of the interaction was personal leisure time for me, many participants at that time crossed the boundary into professional work, using these groups as resources for collaboration.

By the late 90’s, dynamic web techology allowed virtual communities to move to the web with support for more forms of content. While many of these communities had more of a culture and leisure focus, and were seen as a marketing tool, increasingly these communities became resources for professionals. I worked in and internet start-up that hoped to build support for virtual communities as a marketing/distribution vehicle. We explored self-organizing communities driven by common interest, called mybytes.com similar to Yahoo groups. We aquired a company that had developed a social networking site, called Six Degrees, very similar to Linked-in and Facebook in its their current form,

Use of these resources within the enterprise was less prevelant, largely over proprietary and confidentiality concerns. Enterprise collaboration and workgroup software grew to fill this walled garden within corporations, which increasingly needed support for remote work to support national and global efforts. VPNs extended the garden worldwide while insulating the enterprise from the internet at large.

This tension between the intranet and internet was more than a technical and business problem, it was highlighted cultural issues around proprietary corporate culture. Due to other forces as well as the rise of the internet, workers have become less tied to corporations, and more tied to interest based, or professional communities not limited to corporate or geographical boundaries.

As things now stand, the physical corporate office has little to offer workers who are now closer tied to virtual communities than any particular corporate sponsor. Here in the United States, globalization has put pressure on workers to behave more as free lance professionals, as large and small corporations increasingly outsourced and move work to remote locations.

This has made the management of remote work a primary concern for both corporations and free-lancers.

I’ve decided to start a project writing about on-line collaborative work groups. The best label for this I can think of at the moment is Virtual Work Groups. I’ve put together an outline that structures what I want to write about, and I will use this blog to explore some specific topics around this theme.

Here’s an Abstract:

Social Networks and Virtual Communities provide the foundations of Virtual Working Groups: on-line networks of people working in remote locations, collaborating on projects. These groups provide the support traditionally provided by physical corporate offices, structuring work in a social context based on interpersonal relationships and common goals among interdisciplinary groups.

The pragmatics of the modern virtual working group in its efforts to produce valuable products and work output in a traditional sense, such as products and services. The goal of this effort is to define pragmatics for an effective and productive on-line collaboration with concrete, measurable output.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been reading a lot of commentary about the ending of Battlestar Gallactica this morning. If you’re not familiar with the show, go fix that right now before reading this. See you in a few months, you’ll thank me. I’m going to assume that if you’re going to continue reading this post, you’ve seen the whole thing, and the SPOILER WARNINGS are unnecessary.

I feel the show was great over all – probably the best science fiction presentation in TV or Movies. I loved the finale, which aired last friday night. It wrapped up the story, yet left some ambiguity and unanswered questions.

One sticking point for a lot of people is that many events in the story were influenced by unseen forces, which I will call “God” as a convenient shorthand, even though the show is at times more, or less concrete. It seems that some fans wanted God to be nailed down, or defined in rational, even scientific or technological terms. My opinion is that this would have been a huge mistake, akin to Miticlorians from Star Wars. Even though I’m an atheist/humanist in my own beliefs, and like science fiction’s rational emphasis, I like the idea that there are unknowable and unseen forces at work. Without this, I don’t see how characters can be anything other than boring machines, going rationally from point A to point B. There’s some irony in fans wanting this in a show about humans fighting robots.

Do science fiction fans really want everything laid out like that? I like the world-building aspect of science fiction, but it seems to me that without some ambiguity, it’s really not that interesting. I liked how BSG treated its characters’ faith with respect and sincerity, and didn’t blow it all in the end with some sort of “there-a-master-computer-controlling-everything” finale to wrap things up.

It’s probably also true that the religious aspects of the show are superficial and unsatisfying for folks looking for religious stories. But I’d say that expectation is like expecting BSG to meaningfully explain AI robotics. I’d like science fiction to be entertaining, and leave me thinking about its ideas, in that order of priority.

My message to science fiction fans is that if BSG isn’t great science fiction, I’m not sure it deserves to survive. With the channel changing it’s name to SyFy, I’m afraid I know how this will end.

I’ve been thinking about the Fermi Paradox, which is the observation that high estimates for extraterrestrial civilizations are inconsistent with a complete lack of evidence for them. What got me thinking about it, was current issues with space exploration. Getting to Mars seems like an incredible challenge. Several years in space, a completely hostile environment, followed by landing on Mars, which is only slightly less hostile, followed by a return trip that seems likely to fail. Extending that challenge to interstellar distances seems impossible.

From there, I think about a civilization capable of such a feat of interstellar travel. What interest would such a civilization have in diving down into the gravity well of earth? What could they possibly learn from Earth or us, after pulling off such travel? Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen them, because they have no reason to come here. The Fermi Paradox depends on the notion of our own self-importance and the failure of our imagination to grapple with the true scale of the universe.

Deep in the earth, there might be a tiny damp crack with a colony of microscopic organisms wondering about why we’ve never visited them, when it seems so likely we must exist. It really doesn’t occur to them that we just don’t care.

Given that it’s the dark, cold winter I’ve been driven down into the basement to exercise, either on the treadmill or doing some light free-weights. I picked on Metatropolis to prevent this from being a boring effort.

Metatropolis is a collection of stories edited by John Scalzi based on a future where cities and countries are in decline, with new social/economic structures taking their place. This is more than an anthology loosely based around a theme – the stories share this same world.

I’m currently half-way though the second story. This is the first audio book I’ve listened to. It takes a surprising amount of concentration to follow along. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of distraction as I plod along on my treadmill. So far the stories are very thought-provoking.

The themes seem particularly relevant to my field of software development, as the structures and business models are changing rapidly, leaving to me to wonder about my place in it. Old business models are dying, new ones are struggling. Countries don’t really matter. Physical locations don’t matter. The old business of making money be re-implementing the wheel over and over is gone. Solved problems are staying solved.

Both readers have been good. It’s kind of fun to have Col. Tigh read you a story (Michael Hogan). Metatropolis is also available for pre-order in print form if you want to do it the old-fashioned way.

There’s a lot of controversy about copyrights and patents. I see an underlying trend that’s really troubling: the notion that ideas can be owned, and this implies property rights.

Some examples from current events:

Oregon’s Laws are Copyright, and you can’t publish them:

Monster Cable harasses other small cable vendors

Tesla Motors sues competitor over design ideas

Rowling: Potter lexicon is ‘theft’

And this is just today’s news.

I’m not saying that all of these examples are clear-cut in either direction. But what they hold in common is the growing acceptance of the idea that ideas have owners. This is a new and dangerous concept, with drastic implications in a free society.

Copyright and patents were never intended to provide a means of owning ideas. Copyright provides a means of protecting expression, not the ideas within. For example, The movie Terminator is protected by copyright, the idea of a time-traveling robot that kills people is not. Similarly, patents protect process or expression of an invention, not the ideas employed. Software and business process patents simply shouldn’t exist, since both software algorithms and business processes are simply abstract ideas not tied to any particular expression.

The original intent of both copyright and patents was to foster economic incentives for creation and innovation, essentially by granting limited monopolies. Over time, these laws have been twisted to support an ideology that people have the right to own not merely their intellectual output, but the ideas they capture. What is worse is that the growing legal structure around these monopolies means that only those with significant resources to defend their use of ideas may do so freely.

I’ve been reading a lot of postmortems on the battle for HD disk formats. The battle and most analysis miss the larger issues about how media content is packaged and sold.

It’s far from clear that digital downloads will eliminate disk rental or purchases. Media content producers and distributors are uncomfortable with having consumers own content, and tend to want to monitize each and every use. The larger issue isn’t HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray vs. downloads, but the whether or not consumers can own or rent content in a way that’s attractive to them.

Both competing HD disk formats added more intrusive DRM, and DRM interference in interconnects such has HDMI have made this an even larger problem. Blu Ray has already seen an incompatible spec revision, rendering some players obsolete. Blu Ray players run a virtual machine, which allows firmware to be updated as the specification changes, but also presents a tool for planned obsolescence, or even more intrusive DRM in the future, such as time-limited disks.

The DRM imposed on these disk formats further muddies the water. What does it mean to own a disk? Most consumers assume that if they own a disk, they can enjoy the content anytime, anywhere, on any device for the foreseeable future. Increasingly, media companies are not willing to sell content under these terms.

If media companies continue to cause fear and confusion in the marketplace they will continue to kill it. TV and movie viewing is already suffering loses to internet browsing, games, and such. The improved picture quality of HD does not have the pull to expand the market in the face of confusing and customer-hostile products and services.

I’ve thought that the concept of talent is really for constructing excuses for failure, or worse, not even trying.

This article articulates the issue very well:

Scientific American: Raising Smart Kids

This issue was made clear to me when I was a graduate student at Ohio State studying Computer Science. OSU’s CS program was very much oriented towards math, rather than engineering. At the time, I thought of myself as a solid engineer with enough math skills to get by. I was particularly weak at the more theoretical aspects, such as understanding and writing mathematical proofs. I thought of this area as something I just was not good at. I was facing the PhD qualifiers, and realizing for the first time in my academic experience that I just didn’t get it. After a year of classes, study groups, and failing the qualifiers, I finally managed to wrap my head around theoretical CS enough to pass them.

This experience taught me that even talents that seem intrinsic are actually learned and malleable. Your intellectual horsepower is as subject to practice, training, and atrophy just as much as physical endurance and strength. Sure, some things seem to come “naturally”, but real success, particularly in competitive endeavors, comes only through effort.

I got a chance to do some reading over the break.  I’m now about half-way through Gene Wolfe’s The Knight.  I have to say I’m really enjoying it.  The story is about a young man (or boy?) who goes for a hike one day, and after an off sequence of events, finds himself in a different reality, actually a layer cake of realities.  He adopts the name Able of the High Heart, decides to become a knight.

The story in the first person, and simply, with occational tangents, ommissions forward references and inconsistencies, and so it pays to read carefully.  The effort is well worth it.

There are a lot of things about the story I like – the first is that it’s not a story about finding a way back home.    Able has his mission and purpose – to be a knight, and really isn’t interested in returning.

I’m looking forward to reading more.