User:GThomas

George Thomas

George Thomas is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He teaches a variety of courses including the Software Engineering courses in the department. He is interested in seeing how HFOSS projects could be used in these courses. His scholarly interests are in the areas of Multiagent Systems and Natural Language Processing.

Part A - Question 5 - Introduction to IRCs

Part 1 – Walk through of IRC Conversation

How do people interact?

-people go around and share what issues or thoughts they have using the text-based chat functionality. Generally like a face to face meeting where people go around but anyone can jump in as appropriate.

What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix?

-pattern of communication is generally linear with respect to topic; they work on one topic in the meeting agenda and then move on to the next. The language is informal, with some abbreviations, mispellings but for the most part is complete, correctly spelled sentences; not like twitter or other forms of chats.

-during discussion on a topic, people jump in as needed; responses are sometimes out of order.

-discussion is a mix; generally one-to-many but one-to-one is done by addressing specifically the intended target.

Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?

-Clearly, the terms for the meeting bots have significance: #beginmeeting,#endmeeting, #topic to begin a new topic, #info to demarcate some informational items for quick retrieval, #action to demarcate action items, #link to demarcate a link of interest

-meeting leader seems to take the lead(but not exclusively) in using these terms

Can you make any other observations?

-Seems to be a reasonable way of conducting online meetings. My observation through participating in the IRC test chat was that it takes a long time, with a lot of time just spent waiting for people to type. This is even more pronounced than other chat applications, maybe because we get immediate feedback that people are typing, and the commitment to good grammar is much less. In an actual meeting, you have the undivided attention of everyone. In a video chat, the feedback is still much better.

Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot?

-My guess, the nicknames were spelled with capital first letters so the bot could not find a matching user

Part 3 – Join and Observe Channel Discussion

Joined the #OpenMRS channel on May 4th, listened for 8 hours. An international participant complained about getting times mixed up in time zone conversion and missing an important meeting. Lot of discussion in trying to get all meetings in UTC. There was some small talk then a daily scrum meeting began. Everyone went around and gave brief updates. Meeting lasted only 3 minutes.