This is a common perception, and in my opinion, a wrong one. First, the numbers speak well for computer games; there is obviously value that computer game users find in games. However, it is easy for scientists to dismiss that value. Nevertheless, I believe that beyond being a huge industry, we can learn a lot from computer games. Of particular interest to me are user interaction paradigms and the stickiness computer games create.

User interface paradigms evolved roughly in this order:

1. Batch processing — highly delayed feedback to any interaction
2. Hierarchical UIs — modal, hierarchical, and little visual feedback
3. Windowing systems — still a lone soldier, but a bit more feedback
4. Social software (“Web 2.0″) — other people, interactivity, and stickiness
5. Computer games — immersive interactive high-performance collaboration

This is obviously not a very thorough review of user interface paradigms, but it should be sufficient to make my point. Batch systems are largely gone, but there are still plenty of old-school hierarchical UIs where you navigate on text screens, typing codes to get to a menu item and trigger a function. Windowing systems improved over this by reducing the cognitive burden of knowing where is what and helping users find functions more easily. Most traditional business software, in particular SAP’s Business Suite is somewhere stuck between hierarchical UIs and genuine windowing-system-based UIs.

For quite a while, makers of business software have been trying to enter the social software world, enhancing their user interfaces with more interactivity and feedback, including adding awareness of other people, in particular colleagues. When I worked at SAP a couple of years back, everyone wanted SAP’s UI to be like the Facebook UI: Sleek, fast and efficient, social and collaborative, and aesthetically pleasing.

I contend that this falls still a step short of where we should be. That next step will take us to the UIs pioneered by computer games. These UIs are inherently social and focussed on high-performance collaboration. They are immersive and require attention from their users. Anyone who has ever teamed up with other World-of-Warcraft players to slay a dragon knows what I’m talking about. (I actually haven’t but I’ve looked over a gamer’s shoulder. And I watched the first season of The Guild. So much for my ivory tower.) For anyone pointing to casual gaming, I’ll concede that there are UI variants that don’t have to be immersive, but that they’ll nevertheless need to have the right stickiness and allow for collaboration. My prediction for the future of business software is that it will require immersive, attention-demanding, high-performance collaboration and that much of this will take place in virtual worlds.

Over on my research group’s blog I posted a short description of a Ph.D. thesis topic around “gamification of business software” and quickly found interested parties. Gamification of business software uses gaming user interface elements and practices to help create a social community around and increase the stickiness of the business software being enhanced. So stay tuned as to the results of this research.

Last but not least, it seems the state of Bavaria, Germany, is waking up to the significance of computer games: Just today did I receive an RfP for computer games research. (Better late than never.) Such research would befit the city I live in, Nuremberg, which has long been known as a city of (traditional) games, and which is hosting a major toy fair every year.

Reference: Valentin Schöndienst, Hanna Krasnova, Oliver Günther, and Dirk Riehle. “Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise: An Empirical Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2011). Page 931-940.

The paper is available in PDF form. You may also like the prior paper “Modeling Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise” as well as my “patterns of effective tweeting”.

• AMOS Project Concept Summary
• AMOS Praktikum Shipped DosIS 1.0
• Linda Rising on Retrospectives in AMOS Praktikum
• AMOS Praktikum to Present in MedIS (IMI) Kolloquium
• Google Sponsors Agile Methods and Open Source Praktikum
• AMOS Praktikum Says Thank You to Google
• More Smart Phones for AMOS Project

I intend to summarize important developments from the OSR Group on my blog here in irregular intervals.

From what I can tell, companies are shying away from bringing commercial innovation and investment to MediaWiki because of the uncertainty around its intellectual property. I recently talked with a consulting firm that intends to provide services and extensions to MediaWiki. Extension is the MediaWiki term for plug-in, that is program code separate from the main project code but that is executed together with it. When they asked their lawyers whether they could create and sell proprietary extensions to MediaWiki they received a lawyerly “maybe”, which left them wondering whether it would be wise to bank on MediaWiki.

MediaWiki uses the GPLv2 (and later) license family. Whether the GPL applies to extensions has been answered by the community a couple of times with a not-so-resounding “probably not”. Thus, software firms are somewhat left guessing as to the legal situation and the intentions of the MediaWiki development community. Being able to decide on your own when you want to open source or keep something proprietary, however, is key to engaging software firms and creating commercial investment and innovation.

At WikiSym 2010 I talked to a lot of Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) folks. The WMF operates Wikipedia and is the caretaker of MediaWiki. From these discussions I know that the WMF guys want commercial innovation around MediaWiki and are not at all fundamentalists about open-sourcing everything that touches MediaWiki. So here is what I think needs to happen if we want to see MediaWiki benefit from commercial innovation and have it make inroads into the enterprise:

• Exception clause. There must be legal certainty as to whether extensions/plugins can be kept proprietary. The way to go is a clearly defined exception clause to the GPL that covers extensions. It must be safe for a firm to innovate and keep the fruits of their labor for a while. I don’t worry about not sharing: In most cases, competitors and community will catch-up fast enough so that nobody will keep software proprietary for too long.
• Trademarks and other IP. The term “MediaWiki” is important from a marketing perspective due to spill-over effects from Wikipedia. Thus it must be crystal-clear under what circumstances a software firm can use this term in its marketing outreach. The usual solution is to create a foundation, say, the MediaWiki Foundation, which becomes the caretaker of the trademark and other IP, and in which commercial entities can have a stake. [1]

The second bullet item suggests the creation of a MediaWiki Foundation. One may wonder whether the Wikimedia Foundation can play this role. I wouldn’t advise this, because conflict of interest resolution would be difficult in such a setup. The primary mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to steer and operate a specific set of services, and MediaWiki is just the software being used for it. If firms would always fear having to bow to WMF interests when the going gets tough, they’d stay away from the get-go, as they are doing today.

Another alternative would be to transfer rights to a software foundation like the Free Software Foundation (due to GPL) or maybe the Apache Software Foundation if folks were to consider a license change. These foundations are experienced in handling conflicts and might be good caretakers. On the other hand, as the Drupal Foundation shows by comparison, MediaWiki may well be important enough to warrant its own foundation.

[1] Eugene Kim pointed out to me the Wikimedia Foundation trademark policy, which covers WMF trademarks. MediaWiki seems to play only a minor role only, though.

The Paper & Short Paper Deadline is July 3.

ACM CHIMIT ’10

Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

November 12-13, 2010, San Jose, CA (co-located with USENIX LISA in San Jose)

Since 2007, CHIMIT has been the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business, and technology. At CHIMIT, researchers and practitioners share issues, solutions, and research drawing upon fields such as human-computer interaction, human factors, collaborative work, computer systems, and management and service sciences to address cognitive, social, and technical issues in managing the increasing complexity of modern Information Technology (IT) systems.

Information Technology (IT) is central to modern life. From our homes to our largest enterprises, we are surrounded by software and hardware components that support our work and personal lives: wireless access points, network routers, firewalls, virus scanners, databases, web servers, storage and backup systems, etc. These components exist to permit us to do other things, e.g., manage inventory, communicate with friends or customers, sell products through websites, yet all too often managing the underlying IT infrastructure takes time and resources away from the real work at hand. IT systems have grown increasingly complex over the years, and the cost for keeping the infrastructure running is now a significant burden. We are at a turning point where further advances in technology and business efficiency and growth require fundamentally new approaches to IT system design, management, and services.

CHIMIT is an ACM-sponsored conference, and accepted Paper and Short Paper submissions will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. Topics include (but are not limited to):

• User Studies of IT infrastructure management in context, exposing user needs, pain points, work practices, and examples of both successful and unsuccessful work.
• Design – approaches to bring about improved, human-centered IT systems.
• Experimental Studies on the usage of new or existing IT systems.
• Tools and Techniques for improved administration, e.g., visualizations of system behavior, or collaborative interfaces.
• Automation approaches to reduce administration workload or improve productivity.
• Computer supported cooperative work – how do those who manage an organization’s IT interact with the users they support, their technical community, and other stakeholders?
• Organizational Knowledge – how can shared knowledge improve IT management.
• Processes and Practices – examples of best practices and improved processes in IT management.
• New Technologies – how will the changing technological landscape (e.g., Cloud Computing, pervasive mobile devices, etc.) affect IT management?
• IT Beyond the Enterprise – what are the implications now that we’re doing backups, network configuration, etc. in the home?

Submission Dates

• July 3, 2010: Papers and Short Papers Due
• August 7, 2010: Panels and Courses Due
• September 17, 2010: Selections announced
• September 24, 2010: Posters Due
• October 1, 2010: Poster selections announced

The overarching goal of my group’s research is to comprehensively define “the next big” software development method. To that end, we will work to unify agile software development methods with open source software development. Agile methods can cope with changing requirements but don’t scale up well. Open source methods can cope with changing requirements and also scale up well. However, open source remains poorly understood as a development method and practices vary significantly from project to project. Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in the enterprise, but it is open source methods that innovate intra- and inter-company collaboration as well as vendor-customer relationships. Given prior significant research on agile methods, the focus of my group’s work will be on understanding open source methods and practices in both an engineering and a business context.

1. Engineering practices. What makes an open source project succeed? What are best practices of distributed configuration management? How to prioritize feature requests in a community setting? Our engineering practices research will address these and related questions, seeking to develop a comprehensive and validated toolbox of open source best practices. The primary research approach is to generate data-driven hypotheses of how open source practices work, to develop new tools based on the newly defined practices, to experiment with these practices using a software forge, and to validate the refined practices definition. In a typical dissertation, the initially analytical hypothesis generation will be followed-up on by substantial open source software development. Examples of such publications are [1], [2], [3], [4].
2. Single-vendor open source. As the MySQL exit illustrates, open source can be a highly effective and disruptive business strategy, even in a market as established and as conservative as relational databases. Self-sustaining open source communities can help a vendor build a superior product faster and cheaper; in turn the community receives a free-to-use open source project. Beyond engineering practices, open source vendors engage in various business practices to go to market with the open source product. We will investigate and define these business practices and the underlying open source strategies. For this research, we are likely to collaborate with industry partners as well as economics and information systems departments. An example publication is [5].
3. Community open source. In community(-owned) open source projects, software vendors and individual developers come together alike, sometimes for altruistic reasons, sometimes driven by an indirect profit motive. How to develop software if there is no superior to tell you how it is? How much money and labor to invest into community projects like the Eclipse platform? What’s the return on investment for a strategic non-profit member? The answers to these questions mesh engineering with business practices research. They will inform public policy making as the common good created through community open source may need public seed funding. We will approach these questions in collaboration with the respective foundations, their members, and economics researchers. An example publication is [6].

In most cases, as part of a Ph.D. thesis’ validation, I will require software development. Thus, some work, certainly on engineering practices research, will entail substantial software engineering. This is not only supported but desired by the University, which would like to see research not only to be published in the best conferences and journals, but also to be of significant industrial relevance. The professorship is set up to make it easy to turn dissertation work into (open source) startups, and I’ll be actively supporting this. Application domains of immediate interest to me are software development tools, business applications in the cloud, and social software, in particular wikis. I’m also interested in mobile devices, multimedia, and medical technology.

If you are interested in these topics and would like to perform Ph.D. level work, please contact me.

References

[1] Dirk Riehle, John Ellenberger, Tamir Menahem, Boris Mikhailovski, Yuri Natchetoi, Barak Naveh, Thomas Odenwald. “Open Collaboration within Corporations Using Software Forges.” IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 2 (March/April 2009). Page 52-58.

[2] Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle. “The Total Growth of Open Source.” In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008). Springer Verlag, 2008. Page 197-209.

[3] Philipp Hofmann, Dirk Riehle. “Estimating Commit Sizes Efficiently.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2009). Springer Verlag, 2009. Page 105-115.

[4] Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle. “The Commit Size Distribution of Open Source Software.” In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 42). IEEE Press, 2009. Page 1-8.

[5] Dirk Riehle. “The Commercial Open Source Business Model.” In Proceedings of the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009). AIS Electronic Library, 2009. Paper 104.

[6] Dirk Riehle. “The Economic Motivation of Open Source: Stakeholder Perspectives.” IEEE Computer, vol. 40, no. 4 (April 2007). Page 25-32.

You are using Twitter. We would like you to imagine the use of a Twitter-like system for internal collaboration and communication within your enterprise. We are interested in how, why, or why not you would use such a system on the job. We know that your time is very valuable. However, we hope that you can find 10 minutes to complete our survey. As a thank-you every second participant receives a $5 Amazon.com gift card.

Please help out by taking the survey! You input is much appreciated, and if we get enough contributors, you will certainly read about the results of the survey and the adoption model on this blog.

Here the link to the survey: http://www.unipark.de/uc/microblogging. Thanks so much!

dirkriehle: Examples are in-lined using blockquote like this; the author is named first

Table of Contents

1. General Principles
2. Informational Messages
3. Directed Conversations
4. Social Filtering
5. Global Communication

General Principles

First, some general principles:

• Stick to the 140 character limit

There is nothing more annoying than split-up messages that take effort to piece together.

• Tweet to be understood by your reader
• Tweet to most effectively reach your intended reader
• Choose your user name in accordance with your purpose of using Twitter

As to choosing your user name, there are basically three categories

• Function. Choose a term that describes your particular business or your function
• Professional. Choose your real name as your user name to help people find you
• Personal. Choose a screen name that only your friends know

The boundaries between the professional and the personal are increasingly getting blurred, so you may want to tweet under your real name both for business purposes and for personal gratification. You just need to understand that this may affect your followers and may be suboptimal for your overall reach.

Informational Messages

You want to get the message out or just tell the world how you are feeling:

• Use simple straightforward sentences

dirkriehle: Remember Strunk and White? Omit needless words!

• When hitting the character limit, pronouns are the first to go
• Prefer rephrasing with shorter words over removing characters from words

wikisym: Come to WikiSym 2009, the conference for wiki research and practice! http://www.wikisym.org

You can help your message to be more effective by tagging it appropriately:

• Append a hashtag as a shorthand for how you feel about what you described

dirkriehle: SFO to FRA flight significantly overbooked; got a free upgrade to business class; thank you Lufthansa! #happy

• Append a hashtag to send your message into a particular channel

marclaporte: I wonder who else will be attending the Wiki Symposium this year? #wikisym

Hashtags serve (at least) these two purposes:

• as a shorthand for a situation or emotion of yours, and
• as a label for a channel into which your tweet is sent

“Channels” do not exist directly but are realized by standing searches for the hashtag, more below.

You can cautiously pull someone into a directed conversation or global communication.

• Open the message for discussion by addressing someone within the tweet (but not at the beginning)

dirkriehle: Oh no, Thai Café gone? What’s next to go, Moonbeans? RT @Stanford Thai Café displaced after 22 years: http://bit.ly/rGsxT (via @Stanford_Daily)

Supplementary information is provided as links:

• No link without good description of what to expect when clicking
• If you are running out of characters, use a URL shortener to reduce link size

osmb2010: Open Source Meets Business calling for submissions for OSMB 2010 http://ur1.ca/5pje

• Still, prefer full URL over shortened URL if you can fit it in

wikisym: Track the WikiSym 2009 program on the event wiki at http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/ and contribute!

It is common practice to summarize and announce a blog entry using Twitter.

Directed Conversations

A directed conversation is between you and some other person, addressed using the @ sign:

• Put @someone at the beginning of your tweet when you are starting a conversation

dirkriehle: @nadyne Congratulations on getting married!

• Keep @someone at the beginning of your tweet if you want to ensure that person’s attention

Not putting @someone at the beginning of the message opens up the conversation, making it an informational message open to global communication.

• If space permits, when answering, retweet the prior message sent to you

dirkriehle: Anytime! More talks here: http://ur1.ca/7bev RT @OSMB2009 Thank you for your OSMB presentation on open source labor economics

• Create context and history in your message to keep casual readers clued-in

dirkriehle: Yes, but that’s a policy issue, not a personal one RT @chanezon It is harder for women to maintain work life balance http://bit.ly/vT4CE

• End the public conversation if its value to readers has been declining significantly
• Say thank you by direct message, not by public message

We all get overloaded with information we don’t care about. Yet, it is precisely that informational ambience that creates much of the value of Twitter. Hence the following two contradicting patterns:

• Switch to direct messages as soon as you see the public value of your conversation degrading
• Keep the conversation public as long as possible to aid serendipitous informational encounters

Hopefully, future technology improvements will make filtering easier.

Social Filtering

Social filtering, a.k.a. retweeting, is a major feature of the Twitter community:

• Only retweet if you think your followers will benefit from the information
• When retweeting, include the tweet’s lineage using RT @someone

peterthoeny: Funny! RT @dirkriehle @lmaugustin @dhohndel @davest: 11 Undocumented Features Of Google Chrome OS – http://shar.es/Cgvq

Tweets get shortened along the way. Thus, it is important that you can go to the source of a tweet.

• If the sequence of retweets gets too long, reference the original source only; use (from @someone)

asbruckman: Outstanding! 2009 Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov to speak at OOPSLA + WikiSym! (via @wikisym)

• If the sequence gets too long, and you want to pay tribute to your source, use (via @someone)

Global Communication

Twitter is maybe the best example of the real-time web. It allows for commentary and discussion of whatever is going on right now. This applies to global issues and niche communities alike.

To join a particular discussion, you need to find the matching channel to tune into.

• Search for the discussion you are interested in on http://search.twitter.com

The channel is defined by the dominant hashtag you can see in the tweet stream.

• If you want to join a discussion, tag your message accordingly
• If there are multiple hashtags, use all of them, until one has won out

Typically, the shortest hashtag will win.

• For an annual event, drop the year unless it has important meaning

Smart event organizers announce the dominant hashtag on the event’s website.

• Create a standing search for the channel using Twitter Search or your tool’s facilities
• To follow the discussion, observe its channel and act accordingly

Conclusions

I’m sure these patterns and practices are just the beginning and they’ll keep changing. What I put down here came off the top of my head. Thanks to @umityalcinalp, @ccmehil and @jnassi for feedback and encouragement. I’m sure there are other collections like this out there so feel free to post them in the comments section. Any feedback is welcome!

I was attending IBM’s NPUC:09. Like many, my first reaction when I’m unhappy these days is to tweet about it.

dirkriehle: Almaden is a great location, on top of a hill, but cell coverage fails and visitor wireless does not sustain livestreaming the speaker #npuc

Note the use of the event tag #npuc. It was being monitored by an IBM PR person, who I had never met and who I didn’t know. She responded promptly:

saradelecta: @dirkriehle are you having trouble with your wireless access? i know cell coverage isn’t great. happens when u r on top of a mountain.

The very fact that somebody responded to my concern made me feel better about IBM and its Almaden Research Center. It put a human face on an otherwise abstract nuisance. (In a silly but human fashion I was blaming IBM for the lack of cell phone coverage even though they are hardly responsible for it.) So I responded:

dirkriehle: @saradelekta Wireless is OK though slow but don’t really need livestream next to life speaker Real test will be conf call later on cell

Now I spilled my main concern that I might not be able to get on a conference call as I had planned. I had given them an opening for building a positive relationship and they reacted properly; the reaction was fast, professional, and helpful:

saradelecta: @dirkriehle heh! true, but it’s for the unlucky ones that can’t be here. if you need a landline, let me know. we can find ya one.

Now, that’s something. I might have asked for a landline myself, but the very fact that someone suggested it by themselves made me feel welcome and appreciated as a guest.

Turned out, I didn’t have to take them up on it. While my cell phone did indeed fail, I simply switched to Skype and thus handled the problem my way without incurring further work for IBM.

The net result was a constructive and positive interaction that raised my sympathy for IBM where I could easily have been left with the memory of a professional nuisance. I’d call that a win/win using Twitter.