Category: LIBR559M

Whither Web 2.0?

It is now the last week of LIBR 559M, the week of summer term which marks the end of the academic year, which in the bigger scheme of things means September is just around the corner. Not too early, in fact, to start thinking about 2012. For those who follow such things, 2012 is the year that the Mayan long count ends, which by some accounts foretells the end of the world. But more relevantly for this class, 2012 – specifically October 1, 2012 – marks the end of Web 2.0.

Or maybe not. What October 1, 2012 really marks is the date that the tech commentator Christopher Mims (quoted by John Naughton) predicts that the now-declining frequency of appearances of the term “Web 2.0” in Google searches will reach zero. It might be more accurate to say, not so much that this is the end of Web 2.0 the technology, but of Web 2.0 the buzzword. What is certain that there will still be tools and services that will allow people to create and share content on-line, and people will be meeting and forming communities, though whether they will even be calling what they do social networking – or calling the tools that they are using social media – is an open question.

One of the affordances – or perhaps even obligations – of a course like this is the opportunity for each student to wrestle with the questions about the lasting utility or value of the social media we have been studying (the question “are social media a fad?” is as foundational to this course as, say, “what is art?” might be to another).

Is Web 2.0 a buzzword? Almost beyond question. The shoulders of the information superhighway are littered with discarded pieces of eJargon (or do I mean iJargon? it all starts to run together after a while). But also indisputably, there is something, however fuzzy, hidden behind the term, whether it’s AJAX programming that lets your browser run software “in the cloud” or a participatory ethic that lets the user control the transaction. Perhaps, as Naughton muses, it “is simply to say that it’s ‘the web done properly’.”

Are social media a fad? Perhaps, if only to the extent that some Web 2.0 services and products may have promised more than they ultimately delivered, that many people signed up for services following the example of friends or family or celebrities, only to discard them after awhile, like hula hoops and pet rocks. Think of how many people you know started a blog only to abandon it after a few posts, or signed up for a social networking site only to become bored with it and stop using it. Other services have shown tremendous staying power: Wikipedia, You Tube, Flickr, just to name a few.

And what about Library 2.0? Individually, there have been libraries that have had successful ventures into social media that reengaged their patrons and sparked the imagination of the surrounding community. However, I’m inclined to think that if libraries are a dying institution, Library 2.0 as a programme is not going to save them, and if libraries are thriving (and many of them actually seem to be), Library 2.0 can’t take the credit. I say this not least of all because the libraries that I visit on a regular basis, both public and academic, are such bustling places exactly because they are valued physical (not virtual) spaces.

In this course I’ve read and watched a fair number of tech pundits and futurists, so I am now inspired to take my turn and pull out my own doubtlessly unreliable crystal ball. (After all, participation is the name of the game, n’est ce pas?) I predict that the future growth of the social web is going to be constrained at over time by diminishing returns. At some point (soon) most everyone who wants a networked computer in the “have” nations will have one. This rapidly becoming true for mobile telephones, even in much of the developing world, and a similar saturation with smart phones will follow. There is also a limit to how many meaningful connections one person can have with other people, even on line – there is even a limit to the number of meaningless ones! Meanwhile, the number of connections between machines will continue to increase – resulting in a state of hyperconnectivity. Much of the communication between these devices will be simple data, telemetry and the like, but increasingly machines will also autonomously query each other for information with semantic content. These transactions ultimately will be very complex, not to the point envisioned by some of the more utopian visions of the Semantic Web, but complex enough to challenge some of our current notions about information and agency. Like the waves of technology that preceded it, this wave will make some people a lot of money. It will be accompanied with a healthy dollop of hype, some of it undeserved, and, it will be accompanied by its own buzzwords, some of which will be sillier than others. And it will leave librarians and other information professionals struggling for a while, trying to make sense of how the new technologies will affect our institutions, but we will ultimately figure it out, in no small part because of the experiences we will have had with Web 2.0 and all the other technologies we’ve had to master before it. We will understand the changing information needs of our users and will learn how to help them (and their machines). We quite possibly will continue to read books. And at the end we will be … the hyperconnected librarian?

References

John C. Abell (2008). The end of Web 2.0. Wired Magazine. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011.

Cisco Systems (2011). Entering the Zettabyte Era. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011.

David Chartier (2008). No off switch: “Hyperconnectivity” on the rise. Ars Technica. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011.

John Naughton (2011). The death of Web 2.0 is nigh. The Observer / guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011

collaboration LIBR559M Library 2.0

Collaboration: what makes a project a candidate for collaboration?

Post author By Chris Blanton
Post date August 1, 2011
No Comments on Collaboration: what makes a project a candidate for collaboration?

One of the questions facing us as information professionals is, when do we collaborate, and when do we work alone? In some cases, we won’t have the choice. Some external force, perhaps a manager or funding agency, will tell us we have to collaborate. In other circumstances a new task brings with it the question, “do I tackle this on my own, or should I seek out collaborators and approach the problem as a collective?”

The rule for deciding when a project is good candidate for collaboration can be formulated in economic terms: one collaborates when the benefits outweigh the costs of doing so. Such a model is deceptively simple, because costs or benefits can be hard to measure, subjective, or intangible. Costs and benefits can accrue on multiple axes, with costs in one dimension being compensated for by benefits on another dimensions. The personality of the prospective collaborator is a key factor, especially in artistic productions and academic research. (King and Snell provide an in-depth description of process of screening and selecting collaborators in the natural sciences). Except in certain highly structured settings, I suspect most people use a heuristic approach rather than a formal cost calculation when deciding whether to collaborate, with the decision being highly influenced by personal experiences and prejudices about collaboration.

Mary Frank Fox and Catherine Faver divide the costs of collaboration into process costs and outcome costs. Process costs are incurred in the ongoing operation of the process, and in particular of maintaining a team, with its required channels of communication and transactions (costs which may be measured in time, money, or emotional wear and tear on the participants). Outcome costs refer to any reduction in the value of the final product relative to the value that would have been realized without collaboration. Examples of outcome costs include a team of scientists who let themselves be “scooped” by a rival investigator, or a wiki page that is unreadable because of differences in objectives and writing style among the authors.

One type of process cost occurs from the diminishing returns of adding additional members to a team, as Frederick P. Brooks illustrates in his classic book on software engineering, The Mythical Man Month. When knowledge workers are added to a project, the contribution per worker decreases and in some cases becomes negative as time spent on communication and coordination outweighs the contribution of the new additions to the group. This situation becomes exacerbated when people joining the project must master a new body of highly specific or technical knowledge before they can contribute to the project, which means each prospective collaborators have a lengthy period of learning in which their peers have to dedicate time to mentoring them.

Thus one has to weigh the network effect (where the value of the network increases with the number of connections) against the costs of those connections, and the potential of interference effects (as for example, having so many cooks in the kitchen at one time that they are tipping over each other’s sauce pans and blocking access to the refrigerator). Collaboration is most effective when the task can be partitioned into sub-tasks, or when the team members have complementary, rather than redundant, skills (see again King and Snell)..

Web 2.0 applications tilt the balance in favour of collaboration; they lower the cost of participation and widen the pool (mixed metaphor) of potential collaborators. However, there are still likely to be tasks where sustained, concentrated effort by a single person is the most effective approach.

Sometimes an organization may choose to undertake a project in a collaborative model, and deliberately incur extra costs or delays in doing so, because of longer term objectives. For example, the organization may have goals such as:

fostering a culture of collaboration within the organization
building teams that will be expected to work together on other projects in the future, and will be able to profit from the experiences gained and relationships build whiled working on the initial project
building a feeling of ownership in the end product (for example, a tool or process), by including the end users in the development
obtaining funding by including participants from a potential funding agency
engaging the clientele of an organization as participants, to retain loyalty, increase mindshare, or recruit brand ambassadors

Works cited

Brooks, F. 1975. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. New York: Addison-Wesley

Fox, M. F., & Faver, C. A. (1984). “Independence and cooperation in research: The motivations and costs of collaboration.” The Journal of Higher Education, 55(3), 347-359.

King, Z. & Snell. S. (2008). Knowledge Workers and Collaboration: the HR Agenda. Paper for the Centre for Strategic Management and Globalization’s mini-conference on HRM, Knowledge Processes and Organizational Performance. Retrieved from http://www.printedelectronics.net/documents/CBSconferenceKingSnell.pdf 1 August 2011.

LIBR559M

About me and welcome

I am a student in LIBR559M, “Socia Media for Information Professionals,” and this is my blog.

To plagiarize my Twitter profile, I am “by day, a technical communications specialist in Ottawa for Ericsson Canada, and by night a second-year MLIS student at UBC.” On paper — or perhaps I should say in a computer file — I must look something like the very model of a postmodern iSchool student: extensive background in XML, structured authoring, electronic document distribution, and all of that. But secretly I’m the kind of person that library schools try to screen out at all costs: you know, the one who wants to become a librarian because they like books and don’t like people (and did I mention the cats? I have three of them). I am overstating the case a little for dramatic effect, because I’m not really a misanthrope, but you get the general idea: I’m not exactly the person you’d vote most likely to be your library’s standard-bearer for Web 2.0. (For an interesting emprical study on the personality types of librarians that are (and are not) likely to get involved in Library 2.0, see: Aharony, N. (2009). Web 2.0 use by librarians. Library & Information Science Research, 31(1), 29-37.)

But enough about me — let’s move on to the term “hyperconnected” and why it’s in the title of my blog. Because I work in the telecommunications industry, I’m being reminded that the Internet is reaching a turning point in that soon there will be more devices connected to the Internet than users. In the next decade, the biggest contributor to the growth of the Internet will be the addition of assorted smart devices, many of which would be machines we would not normally think as being network entities (refrigerators, bread machines, fire hydrants, and the like). In the hyper-connected network, the user isn’t just an atomic point in the network, but a small cloud of interconnected devices, linked by Ethernet and Bluetooth and technologies that haven’t even been designed yet. Layered on top of this trend, the proliferation of social media and interactive networked applications continues. Each user is potentially connected, not only to more people, but to the same people through an increasing number media. How will all of these changes affect the professional life and work environment of the librarian, archivist, or curator — and will they really make as much difference as the futurists say they will? This course promises to offer some fieldwork in the digital ecosystem. So this week are getting our nets, specimen jars, and tranquilizer darts ready. Next week, we start looking for answers.