Situational Software

Lot's of people have pointed to Shirky's Situated Software. Here's Greg's take on it:

4 example, almost anything from IETF pre-1994 fits his description, including TCP/IP, DNS (hence named), SMTP (hence sendmail), NNTP (hence nntpd), and HTTP (hence CERN & NCSA). Their method & 'tao' were 'situated' in performance, reliability and interoperability.

With Netscape and Apache, we cross into a 'scale' paradigm.

You look at Xerox PARC, it was designed to facilitate staff being 'situated'. Same with Bell Labs, same with Media Labs. It's long been a fundamental aspect of management to get best results.

Interestingly, Shirky doesn't say how long it took them to write the program. It would take me a day.

  1. Install Drupal
  2. Use polls or ratings module, create a node for each prof
  3. Create user accounts with default passwords
  4. Mail out user details

My other comment: how is this different from prototypes?

This is part of the long term Archive, originally published on

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