The afterlife of 'living deliverables': angels or zombies?

2nd International Workshop on Research 2.0, September 28, 2010,

Barcelona, Spain

Fridolin Wild, Thomas UllmannThe Open University

Living deliverables: angels or zombies?

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LIVING DELIVERABLES

Deliverable: pre-defined, tangible, and verifiable work product; report on progress against tasks

Living deliverable: continuously edited with lively activity beyond official delivery deadline; wiki

… prior work … method … analysis … outlook

Detailed Glyph (Arazy et al., 2010)

Sunword Glyph (Arazy et al., 2010)

PRIOR WORK

History Flow (Viegas et al., 2004)

WikiChanges: Sparklines (Nunes et al., 2008)

Focus on individual articles

PRIOR WORK (2)

Revert Graphs (Suh et al., 2007)

Corporate Knowledge Sharing analysed with Sonivis (Baumgrass et al., 2008)

Meso-Zoom Analysis (Jesus et al., 2009)

Different scope or different wiki use

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LIFE AFTER DEADLINE

Angel: cheerful editing activity of a coherent set of pages of a deliverable also after deadline

Zombie: Low or no editing activity after deadline

METHOD OF ANALYSIS

• Data extraction from latest changes feed and versioning history in database

• Statistics on revision histories• Social Network Analysis using revision history– Co-authorship networks: two people edit the

same page = co-authorship: IMA,T x IMTA,T

– Bipartite author-page networks: person edits page = directed edge from person to page: AMA∧P, A∧P

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OBSERVED LIVING DELIVERABLES

Average: 22.7 users, 3 820 page views, selected from 14 living deliverables, thereby excluding small group works and obvious zombies

(no editing activity from the first day)

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CUMULATED EDITS OVER LIFETIME

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CO-AUTHORSHIP NETWORK OF D6.3

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CO-AUTHORSHIP NET W/O ‘HOME’

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Page-author net before deadline

D6.3

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Page-author net after deadline

D6.3

OTHER DELIVERABLES AFTER DEADLINE

D6.2 D1.1 D7.1

D1.2 became a ‘zombie’ (in the period of analysis – might be an angel by today)

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DISCUSSION

• Limit: Don’t mistake wiki co-authorship for overall collaboration on a deliverable

• Limit: Small set of wikis investigated• Found: Way to make activities more transparent• Found: There are phases in life• Found: Shift in focus after delivery• Outlook: differentiation of editing types• Outlook: animation over time• Outlook: reflection tool about collaboration?

BEWARE, THE END IS NEAR.15