Research customs for the 21st century.

 I've begun to notice a number of customs that seem unique to our modern process of doing collaborative research in the 21st century. Most of them are technology-driven, and most of them involving annoying debates about the multitude of choices available for collaborating.

• Research Meetings: whether to do them over Skype, or Google Hangouts, or http://mathim.com or awwapp.com, or even with phones on a conference call. 
• Audio/Video/Chat: if over skype/G+, whether to do audio, or video, or chat. And then the obligatory pre-videconference primping to look presentable (or the reliance on bandwidth failure to NOT go on video)
• Coordination: careful calculations among multiple time zones and daylight savings times to plan meetings. The use of Doodle, Google calendar, or even random emails passed around haphazardly to plan said meetings.
• Writing I: the protracted negotiations over whether to use git, svn, rcs, or cvs, or Dropbox, or random emails passed around haphazardly (and yes I've done all of this, sometimes at the same time)
• Writing II: if using an actual modern VCS, then the equally protracted negotiations over who's hosting it, who needs account access, and where public keys need to be placed, and why CS researchers in the 21st century STILL need tutorials on ssh. 
• Writing III: Dealing with comments on a writeup: as fixmes, as todonotes, as issues in the git repository hosting the document, or as random emails passed around haphazardly. 

And of course all the collaborator "digital" personalities that emerge irrationally and violently. Alice hates using bibtex, and Bob will only use personally crafted bibtex files. Charlie loves his own special fonts and will have raging debates over $\varepsilon$ vs $\epsilon$. Dan has never used version control and doesn't see the point. Erin handcoded her own version control system in a cutting-edge fragment of Haskell and refuses to use anything else. Frank hates online meetings, and Mallory only thinks online during a meeting. Oscar insists that Postscript is Turing-complete and is therefore sufficient for all drawing needs. Peggy insists that git rebase is Turing-complete and is therefore sufficient to fix all commit disasters... eventually.

Note to all my collaborators who I'm currently writing papers with: you are awesome and have NOTHING AT ALL to do with this list.

danah boyd, Randall Munro, and netizens.

danah boyd, author of 'It's Complicated' just gave a tech talk at Google. Her book has been in the news a lot lately, so I'll skip the details (although Facebook ought to be at least slightly worried).

But what I enjoyed the most about her talk was the feeling that I was listening to a true netizen: someone who lives and breathes on the internet, understands (and has helped build) modern technology extremely well (she is a computer scientist as well as an ethnographer), and is able to deliver a subtle and nuanced perspective on the role and use of technology amidst all the technobabble (I'm looking at you, BIG data) that inundates us.

And she delivers a message that's original and "nontrivial". Both about how teens use and interact with social media, and about how we as a society process technological trends and put them in context of our lives. Her discussion of context collapse was enlightening: apart from explaining why weddings are such fraught experiences (better with alcohol!) it helped me understand incidences of cognitive frisson in my own interactions.

What she shares with Randall Munro in my mind is the ability to speak unselfconsciously and natively in a way that rings true for those of us who inhabit the world of tech, and yet articulate things that we might have felt, but are unable to put into words ourselves. Of course they're wildly different in so many other ways, but in this respect they are like ambassadors of the new world we live in.

Free, Freemium, and Paid

There was a time when I'd bridle at the idea of having to pay for software or services. But I browse the iTunes app store now, and see people pleading to have the chance to pay for an app that they like, so that the authors won't stop updating it. The whole kerfuffle with Google Reader, Keep and Evernote is another example of how people have begun to prefer to pay for products, rather than rely on something free.

It feels like the end of an era where open source and free software (not the same thing, but often referred to in the same breath) were the default. Maybe we've come to the realization that nothing is really ever free, and that it's more realistic to get the costs out in the open rather than "being the product".