6 ms·

"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process." Why can't this happen online?

viraptor 9y ago
It's hard to find niche forums where you have small communities these days. Or maybe I lost touch with what the young crowd is doing. From my school times, I remember hanging out on forums where we worked on things like reverse engineering Siemens feature phones. Or my town's IRC channel. Or weird international places like cdc discussions (or was it nsf?). I don't even know we're I could find people with commitment to such ideas anymore. Maybe some private slack instances, or diving into one of the distributed Twitter replacements? I'm not saying these were placed where invocation actually happened, but I know they were a jump start place for many people. It's hard to have meaningful, small, dedicated communities online these days. Anything good gets popular and anything too popular gets bad in the end.
- nawitus 9y ago
  There's still communities for niches. Subreddits, Facebook groups, forums, Slack instances etc.
- mistermann 9y ago
  I think to a degree the runaway success of Stackoverflow had the unfortunate side effect of sucking enough of the oxygen away from some dedicated forums to kill the critical mass needed to maintain these communities on an ongoing basis.
closeparen 9y ago
Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers? Can it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major boon.
- viraptor 9y ago
  > Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers? Yes. It works if you agree that "local" doesn't exist anymore. If one person is remote, everybody is "remote". As long as that's the agreed medium, many issues go away - it actually gets better sometimes, because that private water-cooler conversation which would be interesting to other parties is sometimes available for copy-paste.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    The point is to compare the experience of collaborating deeply with someone who is physically present vs. someone who isn't, not the organizational dynamics of a partial-remote team. I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier. It might be rational to make a conscious tradeoff to optimize for labor and real estate costs vs. collaboration efficiency, especially if you only need to coordinate your separate tasks vs. genuinely work together on the same design and problem-solving activities. But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams.
    - RyanZAG 9y ago
      > I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier. It's fairly controversial, especially among engineers. Not all engineers, but a sizable percentage of engineers are not comfortable in social collaboration - especially forced social collaboration stretching over multiple hours for difficult tasks. As far as 'easier' goes, 'easier' isn't always 'better'. While that online collaboration across a slack channel may have higher friction, it would also have many benefits as well. Other people can follow the entire process, so continuous status updates aren't required. The chat can be stored so if the issue happens again, it's easy to reference back to what was done. > But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams. I don't think this is proven anywhere, and may be one of those things where you think it is correct, but it really isn't. Fully integrated remote work as we have today is a very new phenomenon and there hasn't been much research into it. Further, many quick growing startups that are looking very promising are taking the 'remote first' approach and seem to be benefiting from it from an outsider's perspective.
0x445442 9y ago
Exactly, the achievements of FOSS shows online collaboration is not only possible but can work better than physically centralized counterparts.
- et-al 9y ago
  Is there some sampling bias with FOSS? Most people working on a FOSS project are passionate about it. People working traditional, physically centralised jobs do it because they need money.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Most people working on a FOSS project work in a corporate office with others who rely on the project and have an interest in its future direction and quality.
- rout39574 9y ago
  I'm a long-time FOSS advocate; but I don't see this. I read the Open Source example to suggest that interested participants can overcome the disadvantages of remote collaboration. Oh, and getting (and giving) tiny slices of time from The Right Person overwhelms the utility of lots of time from Random People.
walterstucco 9y ago
You can't have a discussion in front of a beer online.

viraptor 9y ago

It's hard to find niche forums where you have small communities these days. Or maybe I lost touch with what the young crowd is doing. From my school times, I remember hanging out on forums where we worked on things like reverse engineering Siemens feature phones. Or my town's IRC channel. Or weird international places like cdc discussions (or was it nsf?). I don't even know we're I could find people with commitment to such ideas anymore. Maybe some private slack instances, or diving into one of the distributed Twitter replacements? I'm not saying these were placed where invocation actually happened, but I know they were a jump start place for many people. It's hard to have meaningful, small, dedicated communities online these days. Anything good gets popular and anything too popular gets bad in the end.

nawitus 9y ago
There's still communities for niches. Subreddits, Facebook groups, forums, Slack instances etc.
mistermann 9y ago
I think to a degree the runaway success of Stackoverflow had the unfortunate side effect of sucking enough of the oxygen away from some dedicated forums to kill the critical mass needed to maintain these communities on an ongoing basis.

closeparen 9y ago

Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers? Can it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major boon.

viraptor 9y ago
> Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers? Yes. It works if you agree that "local" doesn't exist anymore. If one person is remote, everybody is "remote". As long as that's the agreed medium, many issues go away - it actually gets better sometimes, because that private water-cooler conversation which would be interesting to other parties is sometimes available for copy-paste.
- closeparen 9y ago
  The point is to compare the experience of collaborating deeply with someone who is physically present vs. someone who isn't, not the organizational dynamics of a partial-remote team. I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier. It might be rational to make a conscious tradeoff to optimize for labor and real estate costs vs. collaboration efficiency, especially if you only need to coordinate your separate tasks vs. genuinely work together on the same design and problem-solving activities. But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams.
  - RyanZAG 9y ago
    > I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier. It's fairly controversial, especially among engineers. Not all engineers, but a sizable percentage of engineers are not comfortable in social collaboration - especially forced social collaboration stretching over multiple hours for difficult tasks. As far as 'easier' goes, 'easier' isn't always 'better'. While that online collaboration across a slack channel may have higher friction, it would also have many benefits as well. Other people can follow the entire process, so continuous status updates aren't required. The chat can be stored so if the issue happens again, it's easy to reference back to what was done. > But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams. I don't think this is proven anywhere, and may be one of those things where you think it is correct, but it really isn't. Fully integrated remote work as we have today is a very new phenomenon and there hasn't been much research into it. Further, many quick growing startups that are looking very promising are taking the 'remote first' approach and seem to be benefiting from it from an outsider's perspective.

0x445442 9y ago

Exactly, the achievements of FOSS shows online collaboration is not only possible but can work better than physically centralized counterparts.

et-al 9y ago
Is there some sampling bias with FOSS? Most people working on a FOSS project are passionate about it. People working traditional, physically centralised jobs do it because they need money.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Most people working on a FOSS project work in a corporate office with others who rely on the project and have an interest in its future direction and quality.
rout39574 9y ago
I'm a long-time FOSS advocate; but I don't see this. I read the Open Source example to suggest that interested participants can overcome the disadvantages of remote collaboration. Oh, and getting (and giving) tiny slices of time from The Right Person overwhelms the utility of lots of time from Random People.

walterstucco 9y ago

You can't have a discussion in front of a beer online.