Comments on: Conscious modularity and scaling open collaboration

By: Anders

Anders — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:20:53 +0000

Tim O’Reilly seems to be hitting the same themes here (did he read your post?)

http://fyi.oreilly.com/2009/05/an-interview-with-tim-oreilly-.html

By: P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Towards a ‘conscious modularity’ for open science

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:09:19 +0000

[...] The original with links is here. [...]

By: Mailund on the Internet » Blog Archive » Last week in the blogs

Mailund on the Internet » Blog Archive » Last week in the blogs — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:09:38 +0000

[...] Conscious modularity and scaling open collaboration (Michael Nielsen) [...]

By: Michael Nielsen

Michael Nielsen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:35:24 +0000

Pedro – Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll take a look.

By: Pedro Beltrao

Pedro Beltrao — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:25:32 +0000

This reminds me of discussions about modularity and evolution in biological systems and more generally the whole issue of "evolvability". If you haven't read them already I suggest having a look at Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart' paper in PNAS and this review about protein modularity and evolution of signalling. There are many analogies from biological evolution that could be informative.

By: rrtucci

rrtucci — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:47:58 +0000

I searched for the keyword “Manhattan” in your blog search and came up empty. Maybe the Manhattan Project can teach us some lessons about the practice of collective science

By: links for 2009-04-01 | Yostivanich.com

links for 2009-04-01 | Yostivanich.com — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:07:59 +0000

[...] Michael Nielsen » Conscious modularity and scaling open collaboration "The right lesson to learn from open source software, I think, is that it may be darned hard to achieve modularity in software development, but it can be worth it to reap the benefits of large-scale collaboration." (tags: software science opensource linux apache mozilla research) [...]

By: Robert McNees

Robert McNees — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:52:39 +0000

The amazing thing about Bugzilla is how quickly it was adopted by a vast range of projects. You rarely — if ever — encounter a project nowadays that doesn’t use bugzilla or a similar system.

I’ve created so many bugzilla accounts over the last six or seven years that I’ve lost track. As a serial early adopter of open source projects (I’m still not sure why I feel the compulsion to build new versions of software so often — I’m not a programmer, and it’s not a very productive way to spend my time) I try to file as many bugs as possible. This is where systems like bugzilla are *really* useful: they provide a way for thousands of interested users to contribute to a project, even if they don’t know how to code.

By: F. G. Dorais

F. G. Dorais — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:10:30 +0000

Although not as pronounced as in the open source community, it is apparent that “modularity” has become a cultural trait of computer science in general. In principle, this trait should naturally transpire to areas of computer science that are closest to mathematics. I read a fair amount of theoretical computer science papers and there are many visible cultural differences between TCS papers and pure math papers. I never paid attention to modular thinking per se, but I’m sure that has visible manifestations.

It would be interesting to take an anthropological perspective and look at how this type of thinking has already changed TCS and similar fields. More to the point, it would be of interest to see how collaboration in computer science has evolved with the emergence of massive collaboration in open source software.