Monthly Archives: September 2004

Shifting the Creative Effort

Ripped shamelessly from Stefan Hafliger’s blog :>>:

Have a look at our latest working paper.

Abstract:
Knowledge reuse is fundamental to innovation in many fields, including software development. To date, there is no systematic investigation of knowledge reuse in open source software projects. This paper attempts to fill this gap. The focus lies on the practice of knowledge reuse which consists of the inventory, the incidents and the intensity of knowledge reuse. The study inductively develops an theory based on uantitative and qualitative data drawn from a sample of six open source software projects. We find that knowledge reuse is extensive across the sample and that developers shift their creative effort over time, from reusing software more than writing, to writing more than reusing. Implications for research and management practice are discussed.

Dormice in my trouser

Schloss Bollingen
I’ve spent the weekend with a colleague at the “Zürichsee in the castle of C.G. Jung. I’ve been looking forward to it and enjoyed it immensely: no electricity, no stress,… and a lot of swimming, reading, cooking over open fire. Great! B)
However, a lot of animals live there which I am not used to at all and in the night I was woken by some rustling and scratching. I turned on the pocket lamp: A furry animal with a long tail looked at me from a meter’s distance out of the jeans which I had put carelessly on a chair next to the bed.
At first I thought it was a rat and jumped out of the bed to prevent it from crawling into my sleeping bag. It had huge black eyes (in the light of a pocket lamp they appear much bigger than it seems from the picture below and they do not reflect any light at all)! Hampered in my sleeping bag, not really knowing if these animals prefer a male twen in a sleeping bag for a night snack (think Hot Dog or Toad in a Hole), I didn’t really know what to do. I’d have found it actually a very cute animal (a bit squirrel like), if I hadn’t been that shocked by the black holes staring at me, and the fact that it enjoyed doing something noisy in my trousers at a meter’s length from me while I slept.

I then waved a bit helplessly (and not very brave :oops:) with my arms to signify my resenting the hostile takeover of my jeans. And the dormouse Dormousemust be a rather clever animal: it understood my sign language perfectly well: Without a hurry or showing signs of fear, it got out of the jeans, walked up the wall to the window on the opposite side of the room, climbed the window and left me without looking back.

I bravely shut the window immedietely and brought my pulse down to 180bpm again. I am just so happy that the Dormouse did not run across my face when I slept. I think I would have died…

P.S. Dear Germans: Yes, I understand the irony of a “Siebenschläfer in der Hose” 😉