The other half looks at OSS

[Ron Wickersham]

i'm not so sure that the hackers addressed in the referenced paper are
separated from the commercial "professionals" in the wider scope of
the authors' attempt to communicate.  a previous paper by the authors
is sumarized below:

Ethnomethodologically Informed Ethnography and Information System Design   

Andy Crabtree, David M. Nichols, Jon O'Brien, Mark Rouncefield, and Michael
B. Twidale  

Crabtree et al. object to traditional ethnographic analysis as applied to 
information problems on the basis that the application of pre-defined rules 
and procedures yields an organization of the activity observed from the point 
of view of the analyst rather than that of the participants. Such a 
``constructive analysis'' approach does not describe the actual activities, 
but in the name of objectivity imposes a structure which obscures the real 
world practices through which subjects make sense of their surroundings, 
and produce information. 

Ethnomethodology emphasizes rigorous thick description of local practices by 
assembling concrete cases of preformed activity as the direct units of 
analysis. EM analysis attempts to generate a description in great detail of 
how the described activity could be reproduced in and through the same 
practices. Such description provides a sense of the real world aspects of 
a socially organized setting to systems designers and thus provides the 
exceptions, contradictions, and contingencies of the activities that 
otherwise might not be evident. Practitioners of ethnography and computer 
system design have quite different cultures but communication can lead to 
far better design practices. 

###

-ron

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Lorie Obal wrote:

> Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 22:23:34 -0800 (PST)
> From: Lorie Obal <lobal at cds1.net>
> Reply-To: talk at nblug.org
> To: nblug <talk at nblug.org>
> Subject: The other half looks at OSS
> 
> An interesting article came my way on OSS usability issues.  Thought folks 
> might be interested:
> http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~daven/docs/oss-wp.html
> 
> -Lorie
> 
> -- 
> Lorie Obal
> lobal at cds1.net
> Proudly e-mailed from open source software!
> 
>