A9JacobErynBenZaynabMaryamAaron

A9JacobErynBenZaynabMaryamAaron

To-Do

please discuss / address the following issues:

1. enumerate, analyze, and discusses different "distances"
2. describe technologies for all the distances (existing ones, envisioned ones) which you identified in (1) which help to overcome and reduce these distances
3. does distance matter?
   1. yes? (under which circumstances)
   2. no? (under which circumstances)
4. describe one example based on your personal experience where distance and diversity was
   1. a positive experience
   2. a negative experience

Group Members

Jacob Eryn Ben Zaynab Maryam Aaron

enumerate, analyze, and discusses different "distances"

Spatial Distance: It has become increasingly more common for companies to hire people all over the world. When the company is based in the US and they have a team in China, the teams in both countries will need to be able to collaborate on any projects that they are designing together. This is a "distance" between these people that makes it quite difficult to work around. Not only is there a possible language barrier, they need a way to communicate and send data to each other effectively. Spatial distance, as suggested by the name, refers to an actual physical distance between people. Although many critical stages of collaboration require face-to-face contact or other close spatial interaction, there are efforts to bring distant collaborators together through computer mediated communication. If you have people spread all over the world they can contribute to the same collaboration because of advancements in communication. It is now trivial to call, email, video chat, txt msg, post to forums. Communication can happen with very large spacial distance. In fact I think it is becoming less and less relevant to have face-to-face meetings now. They will always be needed but new technology just makes it easier for people to communicate in efficient ways.

Temporal Distance: Temporal distance, as suggested by the name, refers to a "time distance" between collaborators. The amount of time between when one member contributes to when another member contributes shouldn't really matter. Long-term collaboration is becoming a more and more essential part of successful design as artifacts evolve over time, however, collaboration between original designers and new designers, even if only conceptual, is not something that is at present well supported. It is a shame when something is designed and then within a few years becomes obsolete and of no use to anyone, not even as something to look at and then to improve. In order to really make the best of your time, the goal should be to make the design so that it can evolve in a way to make it constant with that time and so it can improve in order to fit the needs of people when things come up. Besides, nothing is ever perfect and it will take time from many people to get as close as possible. Our constitution is a good example of temporal distance. When its original contributors put it together they really couldn't imagine how long it would really last, and now 300 years later it is still something we work on, learn from, and contribute back to. All collaborations evolve over time, even if the original contributors are still on the team, it is the very definition of collaboration, and constant evolution as time goes on.

Technological Distance: Computers are complex, but they are not people. Although computers should be able to partially understand and perform complex tasks, they should do so in a way that complements human users, rather than replacing them. At present, tools that support human users aren't quite up to the level of sophistication and expertise in their domains that would be ideal to foster human creativity and invention. Nothing can substitute the human mind. A computer should help a person accomplish their goals and try not to limit them, but instead open up new possibilities to give them room to really be creative in whatever they're designing. Computers should be a sort of assistant to the people, they could even give ideas maybe and not be too cumbersome, but ultimately the person is the creative designer. Technology makes collaboration easier and easier. Source control systems allow large groups of people to all work on one whole project, even if subgroups are working on sub parts of the project. It allows for any number of people to change something, commit, and distribute the change, but most importantly it allows people to track and revert changes. People can contribute from any plat form anywhere in the world using different source control managers. Some even have other features, like bug and issue tracking, automated testing, messaging. There are even program which allow 2 users to work on a file at the same time, viewing each other's changes as they happen in real time.

Conceptual Distance: Different communities have different backgrounds, different knowledge, and different expertise. When communication across communities, especially communities in different domains, there is often a conceptual distance between the communities, that can make cooperative work difficult. People tend to be somewhat self-centered, it can be very difficult to go beyond your beliefs and understandings, and still consider someone else's. It seems like a good idea to bring many people, with different backgrounds and ideas, together and have them collaborate on how to solve a problem or create a good design that benefits all stakeholders. This is no easy task, especially when people from different cultures are involved. This can be seen with GUI designs. A designer might mock out a design in photoshop or some other design tool and someone else might be able to chop it up into the front-end code, and someone else could glue the back end code to it, and someone else could write gui tests, and someone else could conduct usability tests. A bunch of people with relatively domain specific knowledge can work together to deliver a single product. However none of them live in a separate box, they have to communicate in order to get things to work or improve what is already there.

describe technologies for all the distances (existing ones, envisioned ones) which you identified in (1) which help to overcome and reduce these distances

Jacob:

Spatial: Many web related or enabled technologies, such as wikis, document sharing, and videoconferencing can help people communicate over spatial distances. Tools like video-conferencing can make people feel face-to-face for trust building, even when spatial distance prevents it. Tools like wikis allow for easy sharing of information, and allows people from all over to contribute to a single body of knowledge. However, there are still many shortcomings in these technologies. Many wikis have difficulty sharing more than the most basic of work (text, images), and lack good ways to present more complex works.

Temporal: Wikis are also a way to help ease temporal distances. Original authors can have all of their work and ideas present and documented in an easy to modify, online wiki that evolves and changes as the artifiact evolves. However, this still has the shortcomings discussed in the Spatial category above.

Technological: Domain oriented design environments and tools like the EDC can help with technological distance. These tools emphasize human interaction with a domain, rather than human interaction with a computer. Integrated critiquing systems can also provide valuable domain oriented feedback and help users locate problems and reflect upon situations, effectively making the computer a more involved tool that brings out the best in the human user.

Conceptual: Tools that abstract away lots of low level details, and present a more domain oriented view, such as the DODEs presented above, can help with conceptual distance. By hiding low level details, users (particularly users who may not have a lot of background knowledge of a concept) can manipulate the larger concepts in a domain, understanding the big picture without being forced to know all the little details. This sort of "big picture" understanding without an in-depth knowledge requirement is sort of similar to the "growing a smaller second head" idea in the fish-scale model.

does distance matter?

Distance obviously matters to different extents, depending on the project. For a very local project, with specific goals and a specific end, distance is less of a factor. Stakeholders will most likely all be local to each other, and if the project is designed to meet a specific problem at hand with little evolution, the impact of temporal distance will most likely be minimized. Similarly, these stakeholders will most likely have in-depth background knowledge and expertise, making the technological and conceptual distance problems less of a factor. For projects that address ill-defined problems, require large amounts of collaboration, or need to evolve over time, distance matters a great deal. Collaborative projects have to put up with spatial distances when stakeholders are scattered across the world. As collaboration is often between stakeholders that don't all possess the same knowledge of different domains, conceptual and technological distances can be a great difficulty. Temporal distance is a big issue for artifacts that must evolve over time. Distance matters if for example you have 10 people working on a bunch of intermingled code, then distance might be a problem. If you could simple yell across the office and ask a simple question about a line of code or an interface, you get much faster response time. You can also sit down and talk through problems (not that it can't be done remotely, it's just more difficult). You can't really interview people adequately remotely.

However distance doesn't matter when you are working on parts of things which don't overlap too much. If you are working in completely different parts of the code base, distance won't slow you down. For example when say a software team working with each other close together on a project will be able to communicate with each, most will be very similar to each other and not have too many differences. Temporal distance may not be something they are concerned about, as long as they get paid in the end. Also, because they will be coding they should be able to work with the computer as they wish and not run into any technological distances.

describe one example (per group member) based on your personal experience where distance and diversity was

Eryn:

1) For a small time I had a pen pal in Japan, we wrote by E-mail in both English and Japanese, though neither one was very good at the others language. I really enjoyed being able to talk with someone so far away in a very different country. It was a very positive experience for me.

2) To be honest I can't think of any time that was a really negative experience for me. Anytime I've dealt with someone who came from a different area, either in person or online, it always went well. And I haven't yet had any problems with temporal or technological distances.

Jacob:

The majority of my endeavors at CU have been very local to the point where distance and diversity haven't really had much of an impact, either positive or negative, on anything that I've done. That said, distance, specifically conceptual distance, has been a little bit of an advantage for my senior project. My project involves knowledge of a few different areas: programming in general, obviously, but also some specialized knowledge of graphics and a specific toolkit, as well as knowledge of space, satellites, and celestial bodies. Different group members, while all capable of handling these things, had varying levels of experience in different areas, and shifted to the areas where they were strongest. This conceptual distance, though fairly minimal, allowed us to utilize everyone's strengths to the fullest, while still facilitating easy communication and collaboration amongst the group.

Ben:

When I worked for a local software company they had a motto to not code yourself into a corner. If you where a database guy you should pair program with a front-end guy, or if you where a Java guy you should pair program with a Ruby guy. This allowed people to get a glimpse into how other people who are experts in different domains operate. They might not learn how to be a rockstar ruby developer but they will learn how the other person thinks. This helps spread conceptual knowledge across the team, and I got to learn quite a bit about all levels of software development.