I finally did it. Last Thursday, I defended my Dissertation at the Open University of the Netherlands and have been promoted to Doctor. The ceremony was a truly remarkable experience with all members of the committee wearing Togas and scientific hats. After I gave a short presentation on my PhD project, the committee members asked questions. Everything worked pretty well except that second last question regarding a linear function…

Thanks to The Open Universiteit, CELSTEC, the SIKS Research School and the University of Paderborn for supporting my PhD project. Many thanks to my supervisors Prof. Dr. Peter B. Sloep and Dr. Hendrik Drachsler for their superb support in the last years and finally a big thank you to my wife Carina for always covering my back.

Thanks to the members of the committee — Terry Anderson, Peter Scott, Erik Duval, Johannes Magenheim, Paul de Bra, Lex Bijlsma — for taking the job and asking interesting questions. I am also very grateful that so many of my friends came to Heerlen and attended the defense.

The PDF of my thesis can be downloaded from here.

Here is a transcript of my presentation:

Most honorable chairman, thank you for the invitation to give a brief summary of my dissertation. I’ll first provide some context for my PhD project and then present some selected results. I’ll close this presentation with some conclusions that can be drawn from my PhD project.

Well, you might wonder why someone would spend some years on investigating awareness support for knowledge workers in research networks. Imagine you start exploring a new research topic. For example social media usage in self-directed workplace learning. You will need to get aware of relevant terms and key authors in that context. You need to find out relevant conferences and journals that publish on the topic. Moreover, you will want to identify relevant research streams and you will reflect on who of your peers might have knowledge on the topic. Maybe even someone in your institution might have expertise on the topic. Maybe the person that is now sitting next to you is THE ONE expert on the topic and a chat during the reception might be a very worthwhile investment. Finally, at some stage you might want to be aware of funding opportunities and current research trends to stay up-to-date.

Investigating these tasks and finding approaches for providing awareness support for them was the main goal of my thesis.

The tasks I previously described are knowledge-intense and require well educated workers. As early as 1959 Peter Drucker identified that our society was shifting into a post-industrial age which was going hand in hand with a shift from manual to non-manual work. While all kind of jobs entail a mix of physical, social and mental work it is the perennial processing of non-standardized and non-linear tasks that characterize knowledge work.

It are so-called knowledge workers that are carrying out these knowledge-intense tasks during their daily work and within my thesis we considered researchers to be the archetype of knowledge workers.
If you look at work descriptions of researchers you quickly recognize that they are knowledge workers par excellence. Researchers have to analyze existing knowledge, deconstruct it and put it in new contexts ever and ever again. On a daily basis, they have to make educated decisions. They have to solve non-routine tasks through applying a multitude of problem solving techniques. After all, it’s their job to create ‘new’ knowledge and to contribute it to their community and the overall research domain. Therefore, they need to be aware of their workplace and what is happening in their domain.

Taking this into account, the core research question of my thesis was “How can we best support knowledge workers’ awareness in Research Networks?” I will explore this question a bit further by looking at what we understand by the term Research Network.

A Research Network is a specialized Learning Network where the participants are scholars. Under a Learning Network I understand an online community of knowledge workers that use learning services to reach their individual learning goals. The participants can have both clearly defined learning goals or can be rather unconscious about them. We also need to have a look at the term awareness in order to fully understand the research question.

In CSCW research the term awareness typically relates to re-establishing conditions of face-to-face interactions. In marketing, awareness usually relates to the degree consumers know about a certain product. Generating public awareness is deemed as a task of the media to establish topics that the public should know about. In this research, however, the term is rather related to being conscious about the activities within a certain research domain, being able to identify experts, spotting trends and relevant publications or events. As an organizer of a conference, awareness could also mean to be supported in the decision which colleagues to select as reviewers for the submitted publications.

Awareness of what is happing in a certain domain has become even more difficult with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, methods and techniques in research practice. A plethora of potentially relevant scientific content is published in a considerable number of different channels and many researchers are simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data. On the other hand, Research 2.0 also leads to the enhancement of traditional research processes and improved interaction between researchers. Last but not least, the Open Access and alternative metrics movements are backed by Research 2.0 achievements.

I will now present a selection of research results from my thesis. As part of my PhD project we conducted six studies that dealt with scholarly practice as knowledge work. I will give a brief introduction to all of them and then talk in more detail about some selected results. In the first empirical study, we started with a more theoretical approach to scholarly practice and the relation between research and knowledge work.

We explored which roles knowledge workers take on during their daily work. Based on a literature-informed study and an online questionnaire filled out by 43 people we could identify 10 different knowledge worker roles and thirteen knowledge actions. The second empirical study was an international awareness interview series, where we asked 42 researchers from different research domains about their understanding of the term awareness and different facets of it. Moreover, we asked them about situations and contexts where they face awareness issues and feel the need for better awareness support. The study provided us with extensive insight into the working practices of researchers and the awareness problems they face in collaboration with peers and in specific situations.

The results from the first two empirical studies became the guideline for the following work in my PhD project.

In the third study we analyzed perennial Research Networks that can be found in Social Media communities. For the analysis we used the Artefact-Actor-Network model that integrates social network analysis with the analysis of so-called artifact networks. As part of this study we also developed the first reference implementation of Artefact-Actor-Networks that makes use of Semantic Web technologies. The study showed that knowledge workers that rely on Social Media as mean for communication and collaboration, are in need of instant awareness support. The need live monitoring facilities and live analysis of content shared there. Moreover, we could show that the similarity of artefacts and actors in a Research Network is independent from a vivid interaction in the network.

Another study of ours investigated a more mature Research Network stemming from the EC-TEL conference community. Here, we analyzed relations between authors, topics and publications and calculated similarities between them. We used an extended version of the Artefact-Actor-Network reference implementation to compute multiple similarity metrics between the publications. This extended version made use of cloud computing approaches and revealed some peculiarities that would have stayed revealed otherwise. From the analysis of the data, we could derive yet missing awareness support features for conference organizers.

In the fifth empirical study we designed a widget-based awareness dashboard that aimed at supporting researchers while they perform typical tasks. The dashboard has then been evaluated in paper-prototyping with users from the application domain. The features of the dashboard could be derived from the awareness issues reported in the awareness interviews and from the results of the two previous studies.

Finally, we presented a technical artifact that builds on all the results of all previous studies. ginkgo is a novel approach to the organization, management and participation of scientific events that has awareness support for organizers and attendees of scientific events as its main goal.

I will now discuss some selected results from the empirical studies in more detail: One result of the first empirical study is a typology of 10 different knowledge worker roles. The results show that all participating knowledge workers take on all identified roles at least once a month.

While some roles such as Learner are commonly taken on, roles like Tracker and Controller are more seldom. The knowledge worker roles typology helps to distinguish between the different roles that people play in creating, sharing and managing knowledge work. Moreover, the results show that 13 different knowledge actions are carried out in the respective knowledge worker roles. The typology of knowledge work actions provides a vocabulary to describe knowledge work execution. Furthermore, it contributes to a shared understanding and the further investigation of knowledge work practices.

From the analysis of the interviews from the second study, we could derive a layer model of awareness that can serve as a general heuristic of the awareness of objects in Research Networks. The general rule of thumb is: the closer an object is to yourself, the more awareness you have of it. Staying aware of more distant objects requires more effort. Self-awareness refers to a researcher’s consciousness of his own identity as a researchers. It is also about how colleagues assess his work, skills and competencies. On the second layer we have awareness of the local research organization. This refers to the knowledge of what is going on in one’s team, group, institution or department. On the same layer we also find awareness of current projects that a researcher is involved in. Being an active part of a project has major positive impact on the overall awareness. Generally there is less awareness of objects in the personal research network. The Personal Research Network is composed of people and objects that a researcher has worked with in the past or plans to do so in the future. Finally, the fifth layer that we could identify from the analysis of the awareness interviews is awareness of a research domain. Here, insight in the general connections, experts, projects and trends in a domain is relevant. Researchers try to stay aware of what is being done in other projects, what is being published and so on.

The position of objects in the individual awareness space is not fixed, but rather the interviewees made clear that objects may change their position in the awareness space at any given time. A spontaneous talk with a colleague from another research group will have immediate impact on the overall awareness of the colleague. On the other hand, it is often the case that ties to fellow researchers loose their strength once a common project has finished and thus the overall awareness of their activities is declining.

In the fourth study, we analyzed the publications from the EC-TEL conference series. Our analysis showed a very fragmented community that is dominated by some prolific authors. For example, 2% of the authors account for 24% of all papers. Also, we could show that the top authors in the network have only very low social power. Our analysis results in the derivation of scientific recommender systems that would help strengthening the nexus in a Research Network.

Finally, we designed and developed a prototype that incorporates all the previous findings. We selected the context of scientific events for our prototype as many of the identified awareness issues deal with that area.

From our point of view, ginkgo is the solution to best support awareness in the context of scientific events as it considered the reported awareness issues already in the design phase of the system. Ginkgo combines classic features of Conference Management Systems with those very well known from many social media applications. It considers awareness support in scientific events as its highest priority and uses interactions with the system as scaffolding for individual awareness support. Ginkgo will prospectively serve as testbed for the evaluation of several identified scientific recommender systems and awareness support visualizations. Moreover, we are working on mobile interfaces to ginkgo, to better support location awareness of event attendees.

Finally, and in conclusion my PhD project showed that when considering the broad understanding of the term awareness in Research Networks as worked out in the thesis, we can support knowledge workers’ awareness in Research Networks a) using tailored techniques, b) using integrated tools, c) considering their roles and specific knowledge actions and d) providing multiple data representations.

Finally, I would like to thank the Open University and especially CELSTEC, the SIKS Research School and the University of Paderborn for supporting my PhD project.

What others say about my PhD:

• News at the CELSTEC website
• Press release of OUNL
• Harold Jarche about my PhD
• Thomas D. Ullmann’s congratulations post

On Friday I was in the Netherlands for a test presentation as preparation for my public defense on 05.04.  It was also the date on which I finally received all copies of the printed book. After the printer had some issues with my LaTeX document and misprinted 180 copies, I finally had the final books. What a great feeling.

I now started sending printed books to friends, family and interested researchers in the TEL community. After the defense I will also share a download link to the PDF here.

Now it’s time to prepare my 10-minute final presentation and for the following questions by the examiners. I’ll let you know how it was…

Last week I attended the RDSRP’11 (Recommendation, Data Sharing, and Research Practices in Science 2.0)  Special Track at the i-Know conference 2011. I presented our ongoing work on ginkgo, a scientific event management tool that combines features from social networks with those widely known in conference management systems.

Based on a literature study we identified different roles and phases that are typically found in the management of scientific events such as conferences, symposia or workshops. ginkgo’s aim is to support all of them in a easy-to-use and socially connected way. We acknowledge the great power of dedicated tools like EasyChair, Twitter or Lanyrd in the context of scientific events but see the need for an integrated solution that combines social networking features and those of classic conference management systems. ginkgo is our approach to overcome the still existing silos in what makes an important part of researchers’ work.

The presentation was received pretty positive with lots of good questions and possible extensions towards recommendations, mobile applications and open science. We know that we still have a long road ahead but we are tensioned where ginkgo will lead us.

Back in 2010 we asked for participation in an online questionnaire that tried to find out the existence of distinguishable roles of knowledge workers and the particular knowledge actions they perform. Today — after a long to-ing and fro-ing with the publisher — the results of the study have been published in the Journal of Knowledge and Process Management operated by Wiley as Knowledge Worker Roles and Actions — Results of Two Empirical Studies.

This paper proposes a typology of knowledge workers and their respective knowledge actions. The extant literature on the definition of knowledge work actions is examined and evaluated. The existing classifications of roles of knowledge workers are evaluated and extended with additional literature and empirical findings on the definition of a typology of knowledge worker roles. The empirical data in this paper comes from two studies. In the Task Execution Study 20, a knowledge worker had to carry out a selection of prepared tasks. The computer system that the participants were using was equipped with sensors, so that the execution steps of the tasks could be traced and analyzed. The data from the second study comes from a questionnaire survey of knowledge workers, which yielded 43 responses. The paper shows that the sampled users take on all identified knowledge worker roles, and that the knowledge work actions can be recognized in the sensor data from the first study. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a new way of classifying the roles of knowledge workers and the knowledge actions they perform during their daily work. Furthermore, the paper provides a preliminary understanding of the relation between knowledge-intense work tasks, the roles they are executed in, and the tools that are used to accomplish the respective tasks.

In the paper we present 10 roles of knowledge workers and 13 knowledge actions. The knowledge worker roles are:

1. Controller,
2. Helper,
3. Learner,
4. Linker,
5. Networker,
6. Organizer,
7. Retriever,
8. Sharer,
9. Solver, and
10. Tracker

The identified knowledge actions are

1. Acquisition,
2. Analyze,
3. Authoring,
4. Co-authoring,
5. Information search
6. Dissemination,
7. Expert search,
8. Feedback,
9. Formal & Informal Learning,
10. Information organization,
11. Monitoring,
12. Networking and
13. Service search

I hope you find the results presented in the article relevant for your own research. If you are not able to access the article due to paywall restrictions please let me know.

We are still exploring ways to best visualize topical relations between Tweets. This time we used Artefact-Actor-Networks and Gephi to build a zoomable graph of hashtag-connected tweets. We took all the 6800+ tweets that have been tagged with #ple_bcn from Twapperkeeper, looked for additional hashtags that were used and draw edges between the tweets. Each edge is labeled with the common hashtag between two tweets.  With this visualization, clusters of similarly tagged messages become visible. There are clusters for keynotes, special sessions, ukulele sessions, the conference location etc. Go and explore the graph yourself. Tell us what you think about this kind of visualization in the comments. What do you like, what do you miss?

To all folks feeling a bit lost in the motivational lowlands…

No Dissertation from ticoneva on Vimeo.

One of my students is exploring the value of social software for communication, collaboration and co-operation in (distributed) teams. He is developing a classification and rating scheme for the tools and aims at recommending tools for several application scenarios and the integration into the model of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

We created a spreadsheet on Google that is open for editing – so if you are interested in this topic and would like to contribute tools to our list, just go ahead and enter your suggestion here.

Thanks for your support.

After the WCC 2010 decided to cancel all workshops we could place our publication in another track of the WCC 2010 conference (Key Competencies in the Knowledge Society). The title of the paper is: “Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants”.

Abstract:

The use of microblogging applications (especially Twitter) is becoming increasingly commonplace in a variety of settings. Today, active conference participants can post messages on microblogging platforms to exchange information quickly and in real-time. Recent research work was based on quantitative analyses in terms of the number of tweets or active Twitter users within a specific time period. In this paper, we examine the content of the contributions and aim to analyze how useful posts are for the “listening” Internet auditorium. It can be shown that only a few microblogs are of interest for non-participants of the specific event and that meaningful usage of a microblogging application requires greater care than previously anticipated.

Final draft:

You can find the final draft of our paper on Scribd.
Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants

Zusammen mit meinem Kollegen Benedikt Schmidt von der TU Darmstadt führe ich eine Online-Studie zu den Rollen von Wissensarbeitern durch. Die Studienergebnisse sollen in unseren jeweiligen Dissertationen verwendet werden, um einerseits Tool-Support für Wissensarbeit zu leisten (Benedikt) und zum Anderen, um die verschiedenen Rollen und Rollen-Aufgaben in eher  schwach strukturierten Arbeitsumgebungen durch Web-Tools zu unterstützen (ich).

Wissensarbeit zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass sie größtenteils aus der Nutzung, Verwaltung und Erzeugung von Information besteht. Die Studie beschäftigt sich mit Wissensarbeitern, den Rollen die sie während der regelmäßigen Arbeit einnehmen und den Aktivitäten die sie zur Durchführung Ihrer Arbeit ausführen. Weiterhin wird versucht typische Tätigkeiten in der Wissensarbeit mit Applikationen zu verknüpfen.

Wir freuen uns über Eure Teilnahme an der Studie, die auf deutsch und englisch verfügbar ist. Insbesondere wollen wir Euch bitten, diesen Aufruf in Euren Communities zu verteilen. Die Umfrage ist selbstverständlich anonym.

Together with my colleague Benedikt Schmidt from TU Darmstadt I am conducting the Knowledge Worker Roles Study in the context of my Ph.D. studies.

In the focus of the study are knowledge workers, the multiple roles they take on during their regular work and the actions they perform during accomplishing their work. A knowledge worker is anyone who develops or uses knowledge in his or her daily working tasks. Furthermore we try to associate application types with the knowledge actions.

We would like to ask you for your participation in the study which will take approximately 25 minutes. Your participation is anonymous and all answers will be treated confidentially.

You can access the survey at http://bit.ly/KWRStudy

Please feel free to forward the link to the survey to your colleagues, retweet or blog about this call for participation.I count on the power of my social network…

We will keep you updated about the results of the study.

I wish you a happy new year 2010. If you have resolutions for this year I hope you will stay with them and get some things done. For me, I only want to proceed with my Ph.D. and the analysis of online activities of scientific groups with Artefact-Actor-Networks. I hope to cooperate with some cool people and to have fun with what we’re doing. Come on guys, let’s kick ass in the TEL research….

This week I had the opportunity to present the idea of Artefact-Actor-Networks at the CollaborateCom 2009 conference in Washington D.C. – a conference mainly focussing on collaborative computing and its applications in networking and at the workplace.
Abstract:

Social networks reflect communication, cooperation and loose acquaintances in networked communities. Numerous metrics allow to expose connections, important persons or clusters within these communities. Furthermore, networks can be spanned to connect documents, blog entries or wiki articles. We call such a network an artefact network. In this paper we introduce the approach of Artefact-Actor-Networks that tries to connect social networks and artefact networks in order to make claims on the semantical connections between persons and manifold artefacts. We present practical use cases for Artefact- Actor-Networks and discuss generic and specific semantical requirements and added values through the existence of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann: Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom’09), November 2009.

I call the theoretical model behind my current research Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) and gave them a dedicated place on the web. From today on there is the domain http://artefact-actor-networks.net where you can stay up-to-date regarding this topic.

Curious about what’s an AAN?

Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) are a theoretical model to link social networks and artefact network in order to make claims about the semantic relatedness between users and their respective artefacts. The general goal of AANs is to ease the understanding of how these to knowledge entities (Trier, 2005) are interconnected, how they influence each other and how we can make use of semantic technologies in this field of research

The two workshop I was involved are already over and I really took a lot out of them. In the morning I was able to attend the Science 2.0 workshop where I presented our paper on Twitter in conferences and the belonging tool. Erik Duval and Peter Scott did a great job with the workshop and selected a wide range of papers that represent the problems and chances of Science 2.0. There was a talk about Mendeley and two talks that analysed co-authorship and co-citation in TEL conferences and Erik, Xaver et al. showed some great visualizations (e.g. this one).

I missed the morning session of the TEL-CoPs workshop but the afternoon session was very interesting and Manolis Tzagarakis gave a really interesting talk about “Practical Lessons Learned while Developing Web 2.0 Collaboration Services for Communities of Practice“. One of the major findings was that you have to develop the UI at first and test this with your users and afterwards focus on the architecture. As we are computer scientists, we tend to do it the other way around. The other thing he pointed out is that the later you introduce features to a tool, the more unlikely it is to be used. There I presented my second paper about how to support CoPs with Twitter. I received mostly positive feedback back there was a heavy discussion about the way we visualize things. I take this critics and will improve future visualizations using visual analytics methods.

You’ll find my slides at slideshare and our tweets here and here.

Our second publication from the MASHl09 workshop at the ICL conference 2009 is also available online.

Abstract:

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and developer awareness. The presented approach uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with an exactingly development environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt and S.Rinne: An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering

My publication about “Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups” from the MASHL09 workshop at the ICL 2009 conference is available online.

Abstract:

Twitter has gained a lot of attention in the last three years. It is used in various use cases from discussing at conferences, taking personal notes or live coverage of prominent events. Communities in Twitter are forming through the usage of a common tag that is part of the message. This paper presents an application for monitoring and visualising the dynamics in such communities, especially dynamics in the written communication of the community and presents approaches to make this application part of a mashup of services in a Personal Learning Environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt:Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups

These are my slides for the presentation at MASHL09 Special Track at ICL 2009 Conference later today. Let’s see what the Mashup experts tell me about the idea of connecting several tools in the context of software engineering…

This morning I had a quick look on the statistics from ALT-C 2009 last week that I gained with our tool twitterVisBT and was impressed: we analysed more than 3800 tweets from more than 680 users. Since some of the attendees asked for more statistics, here is a short screencast of what we analysed…

I recently published the findings of my diploma thesis and the book is now available at Amazon. The book is in german and treats the impact of agile software development methods on competency development. Therefore I did an evaluation of different empirical studies on pair programming and derived instructions and guidance for the use of pair programming in educational settings.

Abstract

Agile Softwareentwicklung ist mehr als ein weiteres neues Schlagwort der Softwaretechnik. Bereits in zahlreichen Praxisprojekten konnte die Leistungsfähigkeit des Ansatzes erfolgreich nachgewiesen werden. Die Rückbesinnung auf erfolgreiche und bewährte Planungs-, Arbeits- und Programmiertechniken sowie die aufmerksame Beachtung und Nutzung ihrer gegenseitigen Einflüsse bieten neue Chancen zu einer erfolgreicheren und effektiveren Entwicklung hochwertiger Software. Agile Methoden der Softwareentwicklung eröffnen zusätzliche Möglichkeiten, die Risiken und Kosten von Projekten besser zu steuern und die zukünftige Wartbarkeit zu verbessern. Pair Programming (PP) ist eine zentrale Arbeitstechnik der leichtgewichtigen Methoden und integrale Praktik des Extreme Programming. Die vorliegende Arbeit führt in agile Vorgehensmodelle zur Softwareentwicklung ein, betrachtet diese kritisch und gibt Hinweise für die Integration in die universitäre Realität. Die Betrachtung der internationalen Kompetenzdiskussion führt hin zur Analyse und Bewertung verschiedener empirischer Studien zum Pair Programming. Abschließend gibt die Arbeit Handlungsempfehlungen für den Einsatz von Pair Programming.

You can buy the book at Amazon here.

Within my Ph.D. thesis I am conducting an international study on how software development teams communicate, cooperate and coordinate their work. I already sent multiple calls for participation to a lot of projects and teams, but I am still seeking for more participants.

If you are involved in a project, where software is developed, designed or planned and if you and your team is willingly to participate in the study please let me knoe. It does not matter if you are a large or small team, if you are open or closed source, in India or Germany. If you want to support me in my research just let me know and I will invite your team to the survey.

PS: Please share my call for participation in your network. Thanks.

I’ve uploaded my slides for todays presentation on my upcoming project group PLME at the University Paderborn. The project group will deal with learning and working in social software engineering and a platform to support communication, coordination and collaboration in multiple projects.

The video shows extracted terms from the communication of the scientific community on Twitter using the hashtag #edmedia from 2009-06-18 until 2009-06-30. This timeframe contains communication before the ED-MEDIA conference, the conference itself and after the ED-MEDIA conference.

We are looking for software teams that are willingly to take part in a short online survey on the use of means of communication in their daily project life. It does not matter if you are a large or small team, whether you are on site or distributed, whether you are an EU project, startup or large company.

With the survey we try to find out which means of communication are useful in specific situations of the development process, which means of communication are really used and how they support the problem solving in a team.

If you and your team are interested in taking part in the survey please contact me and I will send you a link to the survey together with a token that identifies your team. Of course we will share the results of the survey as soon as we have them here on the blog.

A note on privacy:
The survey will be an anonymous one. The record kept of your survey responses will not contain any identifying information about you unless a specific question in the survey will ask for this.

With this post we would like to introduce Microclipse, an Eclipse plugin that allows sending status updates to Twitter and any Laconica instance directly from Eclipse.

I presented the idea of microblogging in software development projects at the SENSE workshop at the Software Engineering 2009 conference and received a lot of good feedback. With the help of Christian Mletzko (Twitter, Website) we developed Microclipse as a lean plugin to any Eclipse-RCP-based platform (including the Eclipse IDE and Flex Builder).

The main requirements to Microclipse were:

• Providing a possibility to update to Twitter or a Laconica instance directly from Eclipse.
• Monitoring a specific tag directly in Eclipse.
• Lean and clear interface.

Installation and Use

Download the plugin and copy it into the plugins folder of your Eclipse-based application (we’re working on an update site). On the next start you should have a new view like this.

Now you can set your preferences for Microclipse. Microclipse can save your connection data for Twitter and one Laconi.ca instance. For each of them you can provide your username, password, the correct server url and the appropriate search base (for Laconi.ca this is where the API can be found). Lastly you can define the monitored tag (only messages containing this tag will show up in the plugin) and how many new messages you would like to see.

After you connected to a Laconi.ca instance and the first refresh your plugin will loke something like this.

When you connect to Twitter the plugin will look like this.

As of today you can download the Microclipse plugin from here. Please provide feedback on the plugin and tell us how you use it. We will use the plugin in some software courses at the University of Paderborn to enrich communication amongst student software developers. If you are interested in a study how the plugin is used in your course, just let me know.

Now enjoy the new Microclipse plugin.