Drifting with Claudio
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Drifting with Claudio Ole Hanseth1 1 Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Olso, Norway.
Correspondence: Ole Hanseth, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, PO Box 1080 Blindern, Olso N-0316, Norway. Tel: þ 47-22-85-24-31; Fax: þ 47-22-85-24-01; E-mail: [email protected]; Url: www.ifi.uio.no/Boleha
European Journal of Information Systems (2005) 14, 474–476. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000572
I first met Claudio in Oslo around 1980. Like so many others we met because of Kristen Nygaard. At this time Claudio spent some months at the University of Oslo as a visiting scholar doing research (together with Leslie Schneider) on the practical impacts of the ‘data agreements’ between the Norwegian trade unions and the employers’ association. At that time I was a masters student. I cannot remember that we talked to each other, but I remember his presence in the corridor – always very visible. Next time we met was 15 years later when Bo Dahlbom invited Claudio to Gothenburg to attend a seminar within a project I also was involved in. We met again a year later when Claudio was invited to spend the fall term in 1996 as Visiting Professor in Gothenburg.
Drift During this stay Kristin Braa invited him to give a seminar in Oslo. Here he presented the main results from Groupware and Teamwork which had just been published. At the centre of his presentation was the concept of technological development as drift. I asked for a more careful definition of the concept. Claudio answered by saying that it meant ‘out of control’. This triggered a, partly rhetorical, follow-up question by commenting that technology-out-of-control was usually another term for technological determinism: was his concept of drifting deterministic and did he consider himself a technological determinist? How to understand technological development – how much control and how much drift? – had been at the centre of Claudio’s research up to that seminar and also at the centre of my interest. And this brief exchange of questions and answers was the starting point of a discussion continuing for more than 8 years. For a period we talked on the phone every day for about 1 h until less than 1 week before he died.
Loosely coupled co-drifting
Received: 27 September 2005 Revised: 28 September 2005 Accepted: 29 September 2005
Until we started collaborating Claudio and I had pretty different careers: He was an academic – I was a practitioner; he focused on social issues – I was developer/technician, etc. In spite of this fact, my interests overlapped with Claudio’s. While a master student I had followed Kristen Nygaard’s classes and had been convinced that software development was a social and political process just as much as it was a technical one. After graduating I started working at the Norwegian Computing Centre with the definition and implementation of programming languages as my main task. After some years my focus changed from compilers to the development of a broader range of tools supporting software development (that at the time were called ‘prog
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