Rambles around computer science

Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time

Tue, 20 Dec 2011

Cathedrals, bazaars and research groups

[Post-hoc clarification: at the time I wrote this rather grumbly post, I was working in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. It doesn't necessarily reflect any on other institution whose domain you might currently be seeing in your address bar!]

A fe months ago I finally got around to watching the video of Guy Steele's “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA '98. It's a spectacularly entertaining and insightful talk.

(It's also a nice demo of how a good keynote doesn't have to be Earth-shattering, as long as it's compelling in concept and delivery. Really, the meat of the talk is quite specific: it's about how language evolution should be managed, with particular reference to the then-ongoing attempts to add two features to Java: generic data types, which we all know and love, and operator overloading, which still hasn't made it.)

It was a nice reminder of the two “organisational modes” of collaborative effort that Eric Raymond called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Building software is one activity where these metaphors apply. Designing languages is another. Research groups are a third.

Like language design and the construction of any large software project (think Linux), research groups aren't a “fully collaborative” activity. Rather, they are “partially collaborative”---it's not that everyone is working with everyone else, but rather, different participants are interested in different pieces of the overall puzzle. There will always be multiple frontiers of progress open concurrently---but all building on a shared central core.

When I was in Cambridge, the group I was in was very much a bazaar in style. There was no unique leader (but rather a gaggle of four or five faculty). Group communications revolve around a mailing list and weekly meetings where discussion was open, informal talks were and anyone would be free to raise questions big and small.

It wasn't a problem-free group, either in general or for me personally. For my first year in the group, the bazaar was dead. That was a tough time---mainly because communication structures reverted to small cathedrals (and I wasn't really a part of any of them). Even later on, I must admit I didn't always feel completely at home. I was a programmer-oriented researcher in a performance- and applications-oriented group. But in hindsight I appreciate that the group's bazaar-like communication structure and ethos were a very good fit for me, even if the topic selection wasn't great. By the end of my PhD, I found I was getting some reward from my participation in the group. in two ways. For one, my work had gained some degree of recognition in the wider group---I felt I had, in my own small way, “shaped the agenda” at least in a tiny corner. (Sadly this was not enough to get others on board with similar work, but also not miles away from that either.) For another, I had participated in the more topic-independent community aspects of a research group---organising the talks for a while, participating in discussions at talks and on the mailing list, being around, organising events, and so on.

I was recently lamenting to myself---a favourite pastime of mine---how right now, my work isn't a “part of” anything. Nobody cares about what I'm doing, or so it seems, and conversely, I find it hard to get enthused about what those around me seem to be doing. But then again, I have very little idea of what their work is, nor they of mine. There is a lack of transparency and a consequent lack of spontaneity. Without cross-linking communication structures, there just aren't the opportunities to spot synergies and find common interests. I have found this a bewilderingly opaque and unsatisfying environment almost since I arrived, but I only recently realised the reason: that it is a severely cathedral-organised group. There is no institutionalised process for cross-talk (such as frequent group meetings or mailing list), and while there are multiple frontiers open, each is coordinated from the top. This clearly works for a lot of people, but not for me. Does that say anything about the kind of researcher I am, or others are?

As an addendum: it's worth briefly mentioning the “agile research groups” idea, one example of which is Scram of Mike Hicks and Jeff Foster. Eric Eide also mentioned to me he uses some of these ideas, to varying degrees of success, in the Flux group at Utah. Coincidentally, I recently dropped in on both these groups! I think these techniques are mostly orthogonal to the cathedral-versus-bazaar issue: they concern the manner (frequency, duration) of communications, not the topology. I expect Scram works best when participants have a common goal, i.e. there may also be tighter topic-coherence requirements on its suitability. These may perhaps even be more likely to hold in a cathedral-style group, although there is certainly no hard-and-fast causal relationship there.

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