Papers 18: Innovation and Professionalization in Technology Communities
Session Chair: Lilia Pavlovsky, Rutgers University
The Innovation Ecology: Collaborative Information, Community Support, and Policy in A Creative Technology Community
G. Freeman1, J. Bardzell2, S. Bardzell2, N. J McNeese1
1Clemson University, United States of America; 2Indiana University, United States of America
In this paper, we explore a network of distributed individuals' collective efforts to establish an innovation ecology allowing them to engage in bottom up creative technological practices in today's information society. Specifically, we present an empirical study of the technological practices in an emerging creative technology community -- independent [indie] game developers in the United States. Based on indie game developers' own accounts, we identified four themes that constitute an innovation ecology from the bottom up, including problem solving; collaborative information seeking, sharing, and reproducing; community support; and policy and politics. We argue that these findings inform our understanding of bottom up technological innovation and shed light on the design of sociotechnical systems that mediate and support such innovation beyond the gaming context.
Professional Identity and Information Use: On Becoming a Machine Learning Developer
C. T. Wolf
IBM Research, Almaden, United States of America
Recently, information behavior (IB) research has drawn attention to the broader life of information, noting its role in discursive practices around social and organizational identity. We explore information's role in occu-pational and professional identity and identification. How information use figures into the ways that individuals become interested in certain profes-sions (and the barriers to entry they experience) can be helpful in develop-ing policy interventions to foster occupational diversity and inclusion, a particular concern in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. This paper reports on a qualitative interview study of machine learn-ing (ML) developers, examining their accounts of how they became inter-ested in the ML field, the barriers they experienced when entering the field, and their patterns of information use in these processes. We discuss the im-plications of our findings, which reveal information use as an organizing principle that simultaneously defines and continually binds a professional community of practice together.
Whether the Evolution of iSchool Revolves Around "Information, Technology and People"?
Y. Cai, P. Wu, P. Zhu
Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China, People's Republic of
As the research topics and specialties of the Information Schools (iSchool) have always been evolving, the new trends in research are emerging constantly. Whether the evolution of iSchool is still pursuing its vision and focusing on specific tracks of the information, technology and people deserves to be investigated. In this paper, the literatures published on 86 Information Science and Library Science journals, included in the Social Sciences Citation Index database of Web of Science between 2006 and 2015 are selected as the dataset. A co-word analysis is conducted to study the research topics of iSchool first. Then, combined with temporal and longitudinal information from literatures, under the help of Citespace, we identify the evolution of each topic. Based on the knowledge evolution, we reveal that the information is the primary line of all topics in the studied period. Technology helps create innovative information systems and designs information solutions to promote the evolution of iSchool, and the evolution of iSchool aims to maximize the potential of humans. In such a comprehensive way of exploring iSchool, a clear identity about iSchool vision is not only can be made, an effective research framework and a reliable reference for real-time tracking research is also provided.