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Raleigh, NC
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, leading projects to help the company scale its open culture. She's an Open Organization Ambassador, contributed to The Open Organization book, and maintains the Open Decision Framework. She is interested in the intersection of open source principles and practices, and how they can transform organizations for the better.
Authored Comments
...that Wave was a tool designed for collaboration. Search is more of a one-way transaction, but when you're going beta with a tool that is meant for people to share across, particularly technical people, it's hard for people to use it if it's not readily available to everyone and if users feel they have no ability to improve it.
I also suspect there was not enough clarity around what Wave was. I heard several Gmail users talk about how it appeared one day and they thought, "I wonder what this is supposed to do, some kind of Facebook thing?" They opened it up but didn't really "get" it, so they never explored it further.
Ah well. The postmortem analysis is always interesting.
<p>Thanks for filling in some gaps. I found when I was reading up on the W&C et al. stories, it was sometimes hard to separate attitudes of the time (sexism and other cultural differences) with ethics. It seems ultimately Franklin was satisfied with how she was acknowledged, and that is definitely significant.</p><p>I can see not wanting to release data immediately, for sure. In other areas, like social science, that would easily lead to crackpots and politicians misusing your work and getting the wrong headlines in the media. (Why is it that the corrections never come with the same fanfare?)</p><p>I am generally for openness, but I also have seen in other fields that it can require new ways of generating revenue, and sometimes it could never be profitable.</p><p>But from the other side, as the mother of a 4 year old with a rare and life-threatening form of food allergy (FPIES), I have been able to see tangible benefits of information-sharing. There is something to be said for researchers who are willing to talk in detail about their findings. I was blown away by how helpful one pair of researchers were when my son's allergist called them with questions after reviewing a paper that I sent.</p><p>Ultimately because of these researchers and their willingness to share their findings beyond what was published, my son will be able to have several experimental blood and skin tests done ahead of time to give us an indication of his chances of passing an in-hospital food challenge before actually going through one. (Because of the severity and irreversibility of his type of reaction, a failed challenge is no small misery.)</p><p>Sometimes even just improving accessibility and informal collaboration is a big leap toward openness.</p><p>In any case, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I owe Mr. Pauling some reading time, it seems.</p>