Male, age 37, married, 5 children, electrical engineering Ph.D., data
compression research, LDS church member, scoutmaster, English native tongue,
reasonably fluent in Spanish, hobbies of skiing and waterskiing (although no
time to do them), debian user for about 1 year, RedHat and Solaris x86 user
prior to that, employed doing research and related programming, mostly C,
desktop and embedded processors. Subscribed to debian-user a few months ago
to get help recovering from an unsuccessful upgrade on 'testing' and switch
to the 'stable' debian distribution (problem resolved successfully in a few
days - it was lilo-related).
Veering a little off-topic: I read an article last night that I think gives
some insight into why debian-user is successful. It appears some people
actually study such things! The article citation is:
N. Kock, "Compensatory adaptation to a lean medium: An action research
investigation of electronic communication in process improvement groups,"
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, vol. 44, no. 4, Dec. 2001,
pp. 267-285.
Here's my "article report" (similar to the book reports I always hated in
school - somehow I developed a bit of a taste for it, I guess!):
A dominant theory in the area of computer-mediated communication
research is known as "media richness theory", and classifies the various
means of communication on a scale from "rich" to "lean". Examples are
face-to-face meetings as the ideal rich medium, and e-mail lists as a rather
lean medium of communication. "Media richness theory hypothesizes that lean
media are not appropriate for knowledge sharing ... and claims that the
selection of media and the outcomes of its use will always reflect this
hypothesis." The particular study found an apparently-contradictory result,
however. The study dealt with fairly small groups organized for 10-45 days
in order to make suggestions of how to improve processes within their
organizations (which were a business and a university in New Zealand).
Participants had been involved in earlier process improvement groups using
face-to-face meetings and the researcher helped them (an approach known as
"action research") to replace the physical meetings with e-mail ones. The
author did in-depth interviews after the groups concluded their work to
gather evidence in the form of perceptions of group cost, group knowledge
sharing, group outcome quality, and group success. He concluded that the
group work had been better in all four ways, and gave two points of
explanations. The first was that the group members adapted to compensate
for the leanness of the medium. The second involved the motivation to
compensate, which he suggested came from "social norms associated with
group-based process improvement tasks, which led to social influences, such
as perceived group mandate and expected behavior by other ... group members,
that were conducive to compensatory adaptation." Basically, in the case of
e-mail which is written, vs. more media-rich vocal means of communication, I
think this quote from one of the interviews sums up the situation quite
well:
"When I write, my thinking process from formulating the ideas in my
head to getting them down becomes more elaborate. I have to take much more
time over that than I would if I was speaking. I think that, because one is
forced to do that by writing the answer down, then the written answer you
get is much more focused. So I think that is an advantage. It requires
more time from the participants, because they have to focus their writing,
but, as a result, you get [better individual contributions]."
A primary conclusion was that "electronic communication tools used
to support groups do not have to be much more sophisticated than simple
email list servers as long as there are social (or perhaps financial)
factors in place that motivate group members to compensate for the leanness
inherent in the electronic communication media used." He mentioned a few
limitations of the research, such as the possibility that unexpected
consequences may happen (for example, "one possible negative consequence is
avoidance by group members to participate in future electronic groups after
their initial experience, as they become increasingly aware of the extra
effort required from them.").
I hope someone else finds the above interesting (I've spared you many
details). Over the last few years I've been impressed with how effective
e-mail and newsgroups, combined with search tools have been. In the case of
debian, the process improvement goal is to get the most out of one's
computer hardware by using free software.
Regards,
Kris Huber
