|
|
for Progress Report due on Mar 13
Thoughts on Chapters 2 and 3.
- Each of Disney people had benefit of being in the group, which is to use
talents of each others even when other corporation proposed
attractive salary and position.
Q: Can any computer system support this highly motivated bindings?
Groupware? E-mail list? Newsgrups? BBS?
A: Interesting, but hard to investigate.
Related concepts: Animation films as boundary objects, Community of Practice, Social Creativity
- The book doesn't mention it, but I think Disney is good at making
rearrangement of existing stories; e.g. Little Mermade by Andersen,
Snow White by Grimm, Muran from Chinese legendary story, and
Atlantis based on Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"
(I, as a Japanese anime fan, would say other "originals" of Lion King and Atlantis, but it's another story:-)
Q: Can any computer system support this collaboration?
Google? lomScope?
A: Digital Library is one choice, but software systems have limitation to support time span of bridging centuries.
A2: Software systems like google can help people to understand old chinese legendary stories to investigate unknown background knowledge. The real difficulty is in how to locate interesting stories in huge spans of time and regions. I really respect Disney's capability to find out interesting stories over the world from centuries of time span.
I think similarity matching technology is one of possible computational support for this activity. Any other else?
Related concepts: socially distributed cognition, temporally distributed cognition
- In old Disney, Walt was the reference of everything. It was a kind
of centralized form of community. Long time after his death, the
corporation went decentralized by making parallel teams.
Q: What did walt provided as the reference, knowledge of animation
or something else?
A: Walt provided 'vision'. People would come to him and show thier
ideas. If they made him feel his vision was being fullfilled, it was accepted,
otherwise it wasn't. I think 'the vision' is always a crucial part of these
great groups. Within Disney, the vision was personified in Walt.
Related concepts: the Novel Prize fallacy
- PARC had concentrated mandatory meeting time every week. Although the book describes it as an information sharing mechanism in PARC, this can also be
considered critiqueing opportunity as reflection-in-action in wider time-span.
Q: What system can support the weekly meetings? LivingOM? Hydra? I don't think Hydra fits into this. Is LivingOM a kind of critiqueing tool?
A: Partially yes. There though still exists something very valuable in actually getting
everyone around a circle and letting them talk. I think we're probably pretty
far from being able to do this well in software today. EDC is a system which is aimed to support this aspect of collaboration.
Q: How do you get groups of people who are geographically seperated to get
something like this benifit.
A: I'm off my home country, but I still feel being in the loop because I have E-mail lists and BBS communities.
I don't think those tools really provide full strength of face to face meetings, but they still work in some sense. One thing we have to be careful is that those communication tools may prevent us from face-to-face meetings and may hinder its necessity.
Related Concepts: Organizational Memory, Critiquing, CSCW
- PARC didn't have loyalty to XEROX, while Macintosh team was
keeping their extreme Apple spirit as pirates.
(Have you seen the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley"?)
Q: If XEROX had LivingOM or something like that, did PARC
researchers respect(a kind of result of critiquing?) XEROX managers, or vice versa?
A: Maybe the respect might not have occured, but the rest of the organization which did have respect for the managers could see what the PARC group was doing and find a way to work with it. There had to be some pretty bright engineers and
business people at Xerox outside of the PARC who could have built on what the PARC group did.
Related concepts: Symmetry of Ignorance, Community of Practice, Distributed Cognition, Organizational Memory
- One concept of "personal computer" was evolved by not only one
organization, but several organizations: Bush(DoD), Kay(PARC),
Jobs(Apple). These three guys are only representive of a bunch of
co-workders.
Q: The book says Jobs just instantly understood the brilliant concepts in
Alto. Can any computer system support this transition of
"creative ideas"? What if Jobs could only get a PowerPoint
presentation? What if Jobs could only get a QuickTime movie?
A: I think the internet has done a good job of this. Perhaps, the internet doesn't support the level of understanding Jobs had when he walked around PARC,
but it could allow him to hear of Alto earlier. I have to imagine that had he heard more about the product earlier, he would have been banging down the doors of PARC to get more.
Related concepts: Live demo as a Boundary Object, Community of Interest
- The book says, "Cutting-edge technology is often a factor in the success of Great Groups, and PARC was no exception."
Q: Is this true? The cutting edge system could be a shared artifacts among
researchers, but I don't think being cutting edge is an essential factor of
substrait of collaborative environment. I guess the role of the cutting edge
system was a testbed to distinguish real researchers and others, besides its role as the shared substrait.
Related concepts: CSCW, ???
Concepts in the class and their appearances
This is off-topic and I don't want to put this into the report, but still slightly related in some sense. I don't agree with the following phrase in the Book;
"Perhaps what is most remarkable about this phenomenon is that the adults who do most of the buying do so not with a sense that they are being exploited, as they so often do when they purchase, say, a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger, but with contented smiles on their faces. The reason for this, of course, is that Walt Disney never created solely for children."
From my experience in Japan, I argue that today's Japanese parents, especially fathers, buy character goods of Ranger series, because the parents grew up watching Ranger series on TV.
Fathers know how kinds are excited by Rangers and many of them even enjoy Rangers TV themselves.
The same thing, shared memory and common favorites by generations, can explain the Disney goods in the US.
The difference of parent's feeling in the US between Disney and Power Rangers is not by creators, but by cultural backgrounds of parents.
Collaboration Independent Research Project
Collaboration Independent Research Project - Progress Report
          
|
|