Oddly Influenced

Open Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mindshare in the software world. It has similarities to Agile, but leans into self-organization in a much more thoroughgoing way. For example, in an OST organization,  teams aren't given a product backlog, they create it themselves. if...

I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement. As with earlier episodes, I'm leaning on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , and Erik Nordman ’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom:...

A short episode that encourages members of software teams to give Elinor Ostrom's ideas a try, in two ways: 1. I'm arranging for Elinor Ostrom's intellectual heirs to provide support. 2. Your situation is not worse than those of Sri Lankan farmers in the Gal Oya irrigation system. A commons-style approach helped them, so why couldn't it help you? I'm looking for teams who want to collaborate with...

Ostrom's core principles for the design of successful commons: how to monitor compliance with rules, how to punish non-compliance, how to resolve disputes, and how to participate in making rules. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , 1990 Erik Nordman , The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action , 2021 "The...

This is the first of two or three episodes that draw on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , and Erik Nordman ’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action . What I hope is that those lessons apply to the problem of keeping codebases from devolving into unworkable piles of crap. Ostr...

My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.” TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything. You might guess, from the previous episode , that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going o...

It’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations. We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.” Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like “helpfulness” are expressed.  So you'll probably need to try it and see ("probe-sense-response"), rather...

The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The answer is, "Well, technically ", but there are clearly more central examples that capture more of the con...

Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991. Note: I'd say this is the least readable of the books I've covered so far, especially if you're allergic to jargon-heavy academic social science. On the plus side, it's only 123 pages (excluding bibliography and index). Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 " I sur...

Julian E. Orr, T alking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job , 1996 Credits Image of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo .

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998. XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it . Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi , 1883. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1961. Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy , The Mass Strike, the Polit...

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998. Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through . Here's a review . " Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quit...

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998. The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.dev Credits Satellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Mentioned One of Glenn 's talks on engineering . The first part of Hillel Wayne 's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial , 1969 Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist , 2010 David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, " A Rational Design Process: How and Why to...

Mark Seemann blog twitter Code That Fits in Your Head , 2021 The books Peter Watts, Blindsight , 2006. Goodreads description . Or: free at the author's site . Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow , 2011 Also mentioned Read Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions , 2006 Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain , 2021 George A. Miller, " The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two...

DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value , 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , 2011 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity , 2021 Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows' Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, " The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds " (PDF) Ian Welsh, " The Totalizing...

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value , 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , 2011 People mentioned Einar W. Høst

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value , 2001 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years , 2011 Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere" , 1998-2000 Credits Picture of a Kula ring gift item , Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 The 1968 Software Engineering Conferenc e An objection to the trading zone Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities , 2002. Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere" , 1998-2000 Credits Roulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot , CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Wikipedia on academic genealogy @made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentioned Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth , 1998 Context-driven testing website and book The Agile Fusion workshop description People mentioned: Lisa Crispin , Ward Cu...

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 1962 Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?" , 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of it, it might be he only uses the Necker cube, not the rabbit/duck.) Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (ed...

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Credits Roman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century , translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912. Source unknown, but the entire book is public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons .

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , 1997 Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming , unfinished Brian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition , unfinished Programming languages: Clojure , ClojureScript , Elixir , Elm , Purescript Credits Photo of proton-antiproton collision from UA5 collaboration, CERN, Public domai...

Lakatos in a nutshell Scientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme. To be progressive , a research program must produce a series of dramatic ("novel") predictions that are confirmed by experiment . This is in con...

James Shore: website , The Art of Agile Development , AOAD  book club , twitter Mentioned Susan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept , 2010 Jeff Patton: website , story mapping articles , story mapping book , twitter Gojko Adzic: website , book on impact mapping , impact mapping website , twitter Diana Larson: website , twitter Alistair Cockburn: websit...