[Themaintainers] Maintainers at BHC, and a reading suggestion

[Ensmenger, Nathan]

I will add my voice to the chorus of folks interested in a Maintainers panel at the BHC.  By my count Bernardo, Ellan, and Andrew have all expressed interest, and we can take the conversation off-list.   If anyone else would like to chime in, just send me an email.

On a completely different point: early on in the history of this mailing list it was suggested that we do a virtual reading group.  I have been thinking recently about how communities of maintainers communicate tacit knowledge, and was reminded of what I would argue is one of the greatest history of technology accounts of maintenance work ever written, namely\


Orr, Julian. Talking About Machines: an Ethnography of a Modern Job, ILR Press Ithaca, NY, 1996.


If you have not read this book, which is about Xerox repair technicians, you should so as soon as possible!   If you are too busy to read the whole book, read chapter 8  (“war stories of the service triangle”), which describes the ways in which these technicians use stories (vignettes, as Orr describes them) to teach each other the complicated knowledge required to diagnose and repair complex machinery.  These stories were typically shared over breakfast at informal gatherings.  When the company tried to formalize this tacit knowledge into a database driven expert system, the whole system broke down (as did the machines…)

Andy and Lee (and others) have done a fabulous job getting the word out about *why* we should study maintenance. Orr’s book is an excellent example of *how* to do it.  If we do decide to do a #maintainers reading group, it might be a good place to start.



-Nathan

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Nathan Ensmenger
Associate Professor of Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University, Bloomington
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/

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