[Themaintainers] Talk: Mace Ojala & Marisa Cohn "Software Maintenance as Materialization of Common Knowledge" (Maintenance & Philosophy of Technology SIG Thursday December 11th 18-1915 UTC+1)

[mark young]

Dear all,

We’re pleased to announce the last session of the SPT maintenance and
philosophy of technology special interest group for 2025 on December 11th
18-1915 UTC+1. For this session, we’re excited to welcome Mace Ojala (Ruhr
University Bochum) and Marisa Cohn (IT University Copenhagen) who’ll be
sharing their research on software maintenance. Their talk provides a
much-needed contribution to our understanding of the epistemology of
maintenance practices, by exploring the role of shared knowledge in the
practices by which code is maintained over time. If you'd like a link for
the talk, please send me a quick email at mark at markthomasyoung.net

Best,
Mark

*Software Maintenance as Materialization of Common Knowledge*

Mace Ojala (Ruhr University Bochum) & Marisa Cohn (IT University Copenhagen)

Thursday December 11th 18-1915 UTC+1

*Abstract:* While development of software always implicitly takes place in
contexts of inherited entanglements and legacies, its maintenance deals
explicitly with what is already present. Software maintenance locates
itself in media res, in the middle of things. Maintaining software
typically involves intervening in the material archive of source code,
documentation, and software tools. Doing so successfully requires relevant
situated knowledge of how the software at hand already hangs together, and
how to effectively put this knowledge to use. This knowledge builds on
first-hand experience, acquired in practice over shared lifetimes of people
and code. For code to continue to endure over time, ongoing articulation of
its entanglements is externalized and materialized across contributing
programmers and software development tools, each themselves vulnerable and
in need of maintenance. This paper analyzes how this process of
externalizing and materializing knowledge is negotiated. We conclude that
the common knowledge which suspends the string figure of software in time
and in a broken world (Jackson 2014) is always a locally hybrid assemblage
which carries this knowledge forward. Hence, to maintain software well is
to add on to its legacy.

(In order to avoid confusion regarding the timing of the talks - the
following table clarifies when the talks begin in different locations)

New York:         12:00

San Francisco: 09:00

London:            17:00

Amsterdam:     18:00

Mark Thomas Young
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Oslo
https://uio.academia.edu/MarkThomasYoung
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