Dreamsongs Wiki

CrossDisciplines

I like the idea of a cross-disciplinary conference, but perhaps it could be bolder than bringing the AI and Object communities together. How about making it a conference in which sociologists could also get academic credit? I'm thinking in particular of the people who do things that go under the name of Science Studies, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (and its offshoot that has "technology" somewhere in the name), Philosophy of Science, and the like.

Many of these people are quite bizarre, making them a nice fit for a conference leaning more toward Onward! Though not technologists, they have a disciplinary habit of digging into the details. For example, I wrote a paper on the relation between the practice of refactoring and Andy Pickering's ideas in The Mangle of Practice. I put lots of pictures in, but there was lots of Java too. The two most serious people in the seminar obviously put a lot of work into studying it.

[http:/www.testing.comwritings/disciplinary-agency-draft.pdf]

Andy Pickering is finishing a book on the British cyberneticians of the 60's, which was a time of great ferment, and we've talked occasionally about the similarities between them and the current crop of agile programmers. He's read XP Explained. Perhaps he could bring some historical and theoretical perspective?

I'm also thinking of the people who work on the boundaries between cultures. For example, Peter Galison has a notion that cooperating communities develop creole languages at their intersection. Although his work has been in high-energy particle physics, I am absolutely sure the analysis would apply to Customers and Programmers working together on an XP team. I'd like to drop a student of Galison's into a room with Eric "ubiquitous language" Evans and Ron Jeffries and me - then see what happens.

There are disciplinary barriers - sociologists talk funny [[you should talk with anthropologists]]- but perhaps that could be overcome.

-- BrianMarick

Almost all of the really interesting research takes place at disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary intersections, and via disciplinary "borrowing" - whether techniques or metaphors.

Academics give a lot of lip service to inter-disciplinary research, but seldom give real academic credit to such work. The paper review committees would have to be expressly instructed that speculative papers have more value than advances within a discipline.

I like cross-disciplinary foci a lot - they make you think. -davewest

the trouble with interdisciplinary is rejections based on "I do not know this, so I do not care" and similar. mdv

This could be solved by making the CrossDisciplines part of a FederatedConference... somehow, we gotta get the CrossDisciplines people there, though. It wouldn't be very CrossDiscipline if only us geeks showed up. And if they showed up, I might even show up. (I've missed last year's and this year's conference due partly to lack of compelling interest) -- KenAuer