April 2003 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

re:e-mail destroying friendships?
by K.Kyriakopoulou 22 Apr '03

22 Apr '03

Hi there! It seems to me that the question about friendship in the electronic environment which lacks face to face communication is closely related to the fundamental characteristics of friendship, provided and categorised by Aristotle. Probably the communication via email offers the possibility for the homonoia or likemindness between the participants to be developed (discussion of interesting issues, exchange of information of common interest etc) , but it may also give birth to a sort of 'parrhesia' based on the lack of face-to-face communication. The conflict that the 'parrhesia' may cause does not -I think- necessarily indicate the termination of a friendship, but it probably provides the friendship -or better, the two parts of the friendship-with a new perspective under which their relationship may be reconsidered. Now, to what extent 'parrhesia' may lead to the dissolution of friendship, depends on the elasticity of the ties between the friends, and on the category of friendship -according to the aristotelian analysis- the particular relationship belongs....or, what do you think about? Kind regards Kalliopi Kyriakopoulou PhD cand. Dept.of Politics and IR, University of Kent, U.K. email: kk36(a)ukc.ac.uk

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2 New Papers + 1 MS Thesis on opensource.mit.edu
by Karim R. Lakhani 22 Apr '03

22 Apr '03

Hello All, Hope all is well. I have posted the following papers on our website. Thanks to the authors for their submissions. Paper 1 Author: Ghosh, Rishab Ayer Title: Clustering and Dependencies in Free/Open Source Software Development: Methodology and Tools http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/ghosh2.pdf Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of measurement of non-monetary economic activity, specifically in the area of free/open source software communities. It describes the problems associated with research on these communities in the absence of measurable monetary transactions, and suggests possible alternatives.. A class of techniques using software source code as factual documentation of economic activity is described and a methodology for the extraction, interpretation and analysis of empirical data from software source code is detailed, with the outline of algorithms for identifying collaborative authorship and determining the identity of coherent economic actors in developer communities. Finally, conclusions are drawn from the application of these techniques to a base of software. Paper 2: Author: Kim, Eugene Eric Title An Introduction to Open Source Communities http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/blueoxen.pdf Abstract: This report describes what open source communities are and how they work. It cites relevant research and presents original case studies of two open source projects: TouchGraph and SquirrelMail. It then identifies patterns of collaboration shared by these projects, and describes how these patterns might apply to other types of communities. Finally, it reviews what is still not well understood about open source communities, and proposes several paths for further research. MS Thesis Author: te Meerman, Sanne Title: Puzzling with a top-down Blueprint and a bottom-up Network: An explorative analysis of the Open Source World using ITIL and Social Network Analysis http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/temeerman.pdf Abstract This paper explains some of the necessary tasks that need to be performed for the construction and maintenance of software. These necessary activities are abstracted from ITIL, a best- practice 'blueprint', that is often used by IT companies to structure their processes. Next, using Social Network Analysis, an investigation is conducted to asses how the activities that ITIL describes are performed in the open source 'network'. Thanks all! -- =============================================== Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan School of Management MIT Free/Open Source Software Research Project e-mail: lakhani(a)mit.edu voice: 617-851-1224 fax: 617-344-0403 http://opensource.mit.edu http://freesoftware.mit.edu http://mit.edu/lakhani/www

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e-mail destroying friendships?
by Charles Ess 22 Apr '03

22 Apr '03

Dear AoIR-ers - Perhaps only a philosopher would take two data points and create a generalization (smile) - but my curiosity has been tickled regarding the following scenario: a friend with a specific political viewpoint regularly forwards e-mails to a list of friends; at some point, someone in the group strongly disagrees with the perspective / argument represented in a forward - and, instead of ignoring the matter, fires back to the whole group; the original sender is embarrassed, angry, etc. - and promptly excludes the debater from the list for subsequently forwards. This has happened to me recently - and, entirely unrelatedly to my own experience, to a friend. The friend commented: I think e-mail is destroying friendships. O.k. - two data points; but I'm curious if the multitude of expert aoir researchers have looked into this phenomenon, especially in the current context (the war, notions of patriotism, etc., make for especially fractious debates) - perhaps as (a) an e-mail analogue to the now well-known and well-researched phenomena of flaming, etc.; (b) a counterpoint to the multiple ways in which e-mail works to foster and reinforce relationships? Curiously, Charles Ess Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Drury University 900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230 Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435 Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html Co-chair, CATaC: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac/ Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23

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Aoir 4.0
by suely.icaro.centro3.unisinos＠icaro.unisinos.br 21 Apr '03

21 Apr '03

Dear all Giving that a) the last deadline announced for author's notification was 14 April b) this information remains unchanged on the Conference's Web Site by today (21 April), should authors who have not received any message from Aoir organisers understand that there were problems with their submissions or am I just being a little too anxious about it? Thanks Sue ------------------------------------------------- Enviado pelo Webmail Net U - UNISINOS Provedor acadêmico de acesso à Internet http://netu.unisinos.br

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Re: [Air-l] e-mail destroying friendships?
by Art McGee 21 Apr '03

21 Apr '03

1. Email didn't destroy your friendship, previously unrecognized political differences did. There is a similar pattern that emerges often in interracial friendships, where folks start out laughing and loving, but when you peel back the veneer of compatibility, the unspoken political and social worldviews that are often tethered to ethnic (or gender, or sexual) identities cause a rupture in the once happy pairings. Usually it's not nearly so caustic as what you described, rather, people just stop communicating with one another and drift away. 2. Email didn't destroy your friendship, your poor use of it did. It was incredibly bad for you to forward emails to a group of people who don't know each other, without Blind Carbon Copying them. The only time emails of that nature should be sent is when people have opted-in to a mailing list of some sort, or when you know for sure that everyone on the list is familiar with each other in at least some rudimentary way. Bad netiquette, very bad. Art

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Digital Technology and National Identity
by andee＠utne.com 21 Apr '03

21 Apr '03

Charles, thanks for posting your slides, technical difficulties not withstanding. What a goldmine of references and concepts summarizing uses of cmc in countries around the world! Do you plan further writings based upon this literature review and synthesis? best, andrea baker

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Re: e-mail destroying friendships?
by Holly Kruse 21 Apr '03

21 Apr '03

I will unlurk for this one... It seems to me that one medium-specific element of this situation is the ability to forward messages to tens and tens, or even hundreds, of people. As I recall, one of the old rules of Netiquette was that people shouldn't pass along to lots of people stuff they find in their inbox without being pretty sure that all of those people are interested in getting the material. Over the many years that I spent as the administrator of a big (1800 subscribers), high volume(50-100 posts per day) non- academic Listserv list, I ended up in many subscribers' address books, and as a result I received a *lot* of unsolicited forwarded material that people sent to everyone in their address books. If some people seemed frequently to be sending material to me and others, I would email them and politely ask them to remove me from the list of people to whom they forwarded this stuff. It did become quite a bother, given the number of people who were mass forwarding messages they thought were interesting, funny, or cute, and thus I think there is a technologically specific element: these weren't people who would have called me up to tell me such things, or written me letters, or even perhaps recalled in conversation that they wanted to mention the material to me. It does seem though, as Nancy indicated, that email works as a two-edged sword. This same function just as easily works to bind people together in communities of interest/affinity. What I often wonder is the degree to which rules of Netiquette are still observed, how, by whom, and in what kind of forums. The Welcome File that I wrote for the list mentioned above starting in 1994 now looks positively Victorian in its insistence on following specified rules of Netiquette. Holly ----- Holly Kruse Faculty of Communication University of Tulsa 600 S. College Ave. Tulsa, OK 74104 918-631-3845 holly-kruse(a)utulsa.edu

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a curious moo -er
by radhika gajjala 21 Apr '03

21 Apr '03

I'd be curious to know if and how people are still using text (telnet) based moo's these days... (anyone remember those? or am I too antiquated a generation of internet users already?;-)) r Radhika Gajjala _______________________ http://www.cyberdiva.org

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Re: [Air-l] a curious moo -er
by Frank Schaap 21 Apr '03

21 Apr '03

> I'd be curious to know if and how people are still using text (telnet) > based moo's these days... I'm not really actively playing anymore on the role-playing MOO I researched for a couple of years, but I do occasionally drop in there. Most of the people I knew have moved on, but it keeps amazing me that new people keep joining, choosing the text-only role-play there over graphical MMORPGs. This MOO doesn't offer anything graphical, old school text-only interface, apart of course from the client you want to use. Frank.

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Re: a curious moo -er
by JASON NOLAN 20 Apr '03

20 Apr '03

Yes, many of us are. But most moos are hybirds anyway. Newbies can go in graphical and then switch to text if they want to. There has really not been any good graphical moo interfaces. I've contributed lots of code to EncoreMOO over the years, and developed our own java telnet emulation, but it is not satisfactory. MooZilla is a very cool implimentation as well. http://projectachieve.net is our gui based hack, and I also host EdenMOO somewhere on the same server, which is all text. Just doing a chapter on moos for a book this summer, which may help to situate them. Moos are just really too cool for the general net at the moment. I'm sure they'll surface in 3-5 years when someone (like me) gets the time to do a proper rebuild from scratch. I've got a team waiting to do it, just not the funding. J -- ------ Jason Nolan, PhD Knowledge Media Design Institute Bahen Centre for Information Technology University of Toronto --- mailto:jason@jasonnolan.net phone:416-946-8513 http://jasonnolan.net/

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