Assignment 1 Essay

1. Major published works and conference activity over the last 10 years

Ward Cunningham has been involved in a number of major innovations over the past 15 years including Extreme Programming and design patterns.  His major contribution to the development of online communities however has been the conception of the concept of a wiki (“Ward Cunningham”, n.d.).  His initial “published work” was the publishing of the WikiWikiWeb to his consultancy’s website in 1995 but he followed this up with the publication of the book The Wiki Way in 2001.  In addition to his published work he has also been a keynote speaker at the WikiSym conference in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Jenny Preece’s current research is concerned with the design and management of online communities, particularly in terms of their the sociability and usability (“Jenny Preece”, n.d.).  Her major published work is ‘Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction’, published in 2002 (which being an interaction designer I happen to own).  In 2000 she also published Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability.  There is sketchy information about a book titled ‘User interfaces in the Real World’ that was published in 2007 and now appears to be out of print.  In 2005 she was Education Co-chair for the CHI conference (Computer-Human Interaction) (“Human computer interaction: Beyond human-computer interaction” 2007).  I also found a reference on Amazon to her contributing to the ‘Communities and Technologies 2005: Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005’.

2. Evolution of ideas

The evolution of the wiki can be clearly seen by looking at Cunningham’s original wiki project (which is still live at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki nearly 15 years later) and then contrasting this to Wikipedia, currently the most famous example of a wiki.  The original vision can be found within the first few lines of the landing page and reveals the beginnings of the wiki concept, “Wiki is a composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration. Really, we don’t know quite what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating asynchronously across the network.” (“Front Page”, n.d.).  Fifteen years on, Wikipedia represents a body of knowledge generated by millions of people.  Alexa shows that yesterday (28th August 2009), 10% of all global internet users visited the site (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t).

*** Update ***

The man himself has offered some addition insight into inspiration below in the comments.

The development of Preece’s work is decidedly more subtle given the fact that she is an academic addressing a broad topic rather than someone responsible for a specific technology.  There are definite hints in the titles of her publications to a journey from more ‘traditional’ human-computer interaction to the broader and more holistic fields of interaction design and user experience and sociology.  This can be seen from ‘A guide to usability: Human Factors in Computing’ (1993) to ‘Human-Computer Interaction: Concepts and Design’ (1994) and then ‘Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000)’ and finally ‘Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction’ (2002).

3. Light-bulb ideas

Cunningham started the project as an Apple Hypercard stack with information about certain keywords.  If there was no information for a particular keyword, Hypercard would create a new card for it.  Although this is a very simple concept, this is the essence of the wiki and the fundamental idea that he fleshed out when creating WikiWikiWeb.

In ‘Online Communities’ (2000) Preece brought together the usability focus of human-computer interaction field and the broader human focus of sociability.  This is articulated in the introduction to the book “… enable you to understand the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability.  People’s interactions create online communities, and developers can influence their success by how they design policies and software” (Preece, 2000).  This marriage of usability and sociability was a powerful and novel approach which Preece is still pursuing today.

4. Change managers for other workgroups.

Preece and Cunningham’s have had two very different careers.  While Preece is a researcher and academic, Cunningham has had a varied career in industry and held various senior posts related to a range of specialisations.  Based on this it would appear that Cunningham is an excellent change manager and has successfully implemented change at the highest level in some of the largest corporations in the world.  It is difficult to comment on Preece as a change manager however due to the academic nature of her work.

5. Shared experiences, synergy and context.

As an interaction designer with a background in programming I can relate well on many points to both Cunningham and Preece.  As mentioned above, I actually own a copy of Preece’s ‘Interaction Design’ text.  I work for a company who practices large-scale agile development (http://www.conchango.com/ and http://blogs.conchango.com/tags/Agile/default.aspx) so I deeply appreciate Cunningham’s contribution to Extreme Programming.  I also have an abiding interest in design patterns (particularly their use in interaction design).  Although my affinity with Preece is based on my interaction design interests rather than anything to do with online communities, I am increasingly becoming interested in the contextual and social aspects of design so can appreciate her work in this area.

Preece, J.  (2000).  Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

Ward Cunningham. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham.

Jenny Preece. (n.d.). Retrieved September 6, 2009, from http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presenters/Jenny_Preece.

Meet the authors. In Interaction Design: Beyond Human-computer interaction. (2007).  Retrieved September 6, 2009, from http://www.id-book.com/

Front Page. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.

Collwer, J. (2005, August 9). Kim Bruning discusses Wikimania. Wikinews. Retrieved from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview:_Wikinewsie_Kim_Bruning_discusses_Wikimania.

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