Guerilla Informatics

Living with interruptions, yet still getting things done

Ever wonder what the true impact of interruptions were in your work? We live with "continuous partial attention" reports a human factors researcher at Microsoft featured in this article. You'll also see references to Allen's Book "Getting Things Done" (see link in margin) and his followers such as Danny O'Brian and Merlin Mann at 43 Folders. Another researcher at Microsoft describes his work on having a computer to recognize a user's "busy state" by seeing how much they type, watching them with a webcam and listening to them with a microphone. Ideally, such systems could know when to avoid interrupting you or when you should avoid interrupting others (when you don't have the social cues from sitting in a cube next to someone).

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times: By CLIVE THOMPSON Published: October 16, 2005
In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher, living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab, enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began, that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list - only to suffer an endless stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so constantly distracted that she would have accomplished o"

Would anonymous forums work for scientists?

The ever-provocative Russell Beattie caught my attention with this post about reconsidering the benefits of forums that allow Anonymity: "

I’ve been obsessing lately about a new concept I noticed a couple weeks ago. I was looking something up online and found this fascinating overview on Wikipedia of the most popular web forum in the world called ‘2 Channel’ or 2ch. It’s a Japanese site which, according to this stats page, gets over 2.5 million posts a day. Wow. The most amazing thing about the site - and the thing that separates it in my mind from just about every other forum I’ve ever seen is that Anonymity isn’t just permitted, it’s encouraged. More on this in a bit.

Forums with no traffic are useless, registration requires far too much activation energy, and its really hard for a small community to bring up the traffic to make forums worthwhile.

Today I was asked to consider contributing to macresearch.org. I'm no expert on community building, but its clear that low-volume registration-only forums won't work for them, either. I wonder if a merit-driven, anonymous forum for scientists would work here? And even if you did get traffic with this approach, could a fledgling community site bear to host content that was impolite to individuals or corporations (e.g. Apple)? It might be worth giving something a try, because in my opinion, low traffic forums like these have more of a negative than positive effect on a website.