What's the relationship between your design informalisms and continuous design?
Informalisms refer to artefacts, to the medium. Continuous design characterises the practice or process; what produces or consumes the artefacts.
What about management?
There's a self-management process we're calling "virtual project management." As the participants start to make choices, to create functionality in certain ways, using certain tools with certain architectural tendencies, they constrain how subsequent choices can be made and how the system can be expanded or not. I look at the project and say, "Here's something I can do," and I become a virtual owner or a designated leader who has a certain amount to say in an area. From an organisational standpoint, this looks less like a hierarchical organisation than a meritocracy. People ascend to positions of authority based on accomplishment and expertise.
And yet, there is a hierarchy, isn't there? Projects have owners.
The idea of a meritocracy is not independent of hierarchies. They tend to be not as tall and broader or wider than others. There might be a group of elders or a single individual providing the vision. There is a sort of layering going on here, but the layers are permeable.
Have you been looking at just the sort of grassroots open-source projects? Or have you also been looking at the more recent corporate projects?
Yes, we have been looking at the modern-day version of these corporate-sponsored open-source projects. An example would be NetBeans at Sun. Another is Eclipse at IBM, and a third is the Gelato Federation sponsored by Hewlett-Packard. There's a growing number of these large corporate-sponsored open-source projects, meaning that the corporation is assigning its salaried employees to work full- or part-time on the project. They may be either trying to put together what the volunteer community is doing or addressing the parts of the system no volunteers have stepped forward to do.
