Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I wanting to discuss “Culture of Asynchronous Communication” with my wife, and that lead me to opine that ‘asynchronous’ seems to lack an equivalent term in colloquial speech. The word synchronous is rare too. Synchronized swimming? Then there is that classic moment when the star of the movie instructs his commando squad to synchronize their watches.

She suggested the wonderful term: “Parallel Play.”

That’s just too much fun! Metaphor loose in the hall. Tenure as parallel play? Does the creative work demand parallel play time? See also the delightful: Blogging as Parallel Play.

“Culture of Asynchronous Communication” was for many years a cornerstone of open source development. It’s notable how little analysis has gone into that. Most open source projects are coordinated with amazingly low bandwidth and extremely high latency. This is often one of the most difficult cultural conventions for people emigrating in from other software subcultures.

One neat, but certainly unintended, consequence of that was it created an audit trail that social scientists could pick apart.

We do not know if this is a necessary element to a high functioning open source project. Is there a sweet spot in the space of bandwidth and latency? What aspects of the task domain shift the location of that sweet spot?

I am confident there is a complement to Brook’s insight that “Assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule, could actually make it even more late.”

Adding more bandwidth and lowering latency to collaborative work can make it less collaborative.

Some speaker at ApacheCon thru up a list like this. I wanted to get it into my frameworks category.

A good working environment for a programmer:

• An office with a door
• …and no phone
• A culture of asynchronous communication
• A fast workstation
• …and two monitors. You wouldn’t believe how much difference a second monitor makes
• …and their operating system of choice
• Good development tools.
• A fast Internet connection
• Snacks and drinks they don’t need to leave the office for
• A good-natured working environment
• Flexible working hours
• Tasks appropriate to their ability
• … and if at all possible, that they find interesting
• Investment (emotional or financial) in the end-product

This appears to be the original source: The floggings will continue until morale improves.

This is a great list as far as it goes.

But, there are some serious things wrong with this list. From the labor point of view it is is far too selfish in nature. From the manager point of view it’s reflects the what I’ve sometimes referred to as the dwarf model of labor management - “Lock them in a room with a pile of straw and wait for the gold to appear.” Organizations are more subtle creatures than that!

I’d certainly add things like effective organization, collaboration, and leadership. The no phone thing seems a bit over the top and probably redundant with the culture of asynchronous communication. Also lacking is anything about assuring the collective work is in fact collective. In fact I suspect that all the failure modes enumerated in Implementation Games could hide out in an organization that managed to do everything the list above.

How do you shift yet more income from the lower ends to the upper ends of the wealth distribution.

Well you could eliminate the sales tax deduction.

The Bush administration’s plan to overhaul the federal tax code includes eliminating the state sales tax deduction…

There are the old classics:

… shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment …

But how’s this for a real block buster?

…scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, …

That should bump a few million people off the health insurance roles.

Nation building is so much easier if you lower your baseline.

Eve Maler does needlepoint during standards meetings!

Samplers have a long tradition of teaching moral lessons to the young while presumably guarding them from the dangers posed by idle hands.

Open source has taught me that a person with a talent is an opportunity. Done right it’s fun for everybody. I suggested what the world needed some of the design principles of the Internet rendered in cross point.

Might be a best practice if standards authors were required to execute some samplers first.

Eve made that and gave it to Lauren Wood; who hopefully can display it regularly to those in need.

Curiously, my wife just acquired some very nice antique lace. Lucky her!