Rogue-Developer.com

Computer science tends to do very precise research. Limiting scope is effective in making systems easier to analyze, but often misses the big picture and suffers for it.

Taking HCI [Human-computer Interaction] this semester seems to deal much more than usual with the big picture. How people interact with computers is suprisingly a really small part of this, with a core of expressive strength coming from human-human interactions caused or facilitated by software.

When looking at the open source model we see many piecemeal technologies, from low level ideas such as compilers, source code versioning to high level ideas like online help, issue tracking and knowledge bases. Each of which operates autonomously with little interconnect, which makes connections difficult to expose.

I've been struggling to come up with a topic for my a) thesis b) HCI term project and I'm leaning towards a unified theory of workflow management for O.S.S.

Its a far cry from what I thought I was going to do, but my heart is in it. I'll take a little more time to think about it.