#2 Focusing on your area of academic, social or professional interest, choose a current issue facing labor or social policy. What debates surround this issue? What positions do the various “sides” take? Once you have examined these various positions, make a case for a particular approach that you believe would help improve the situation. In what ways would that approach provide a solution?
According to the State University of New York’s Levin Institute;
Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world. Technology has been [a] principal driver of globalization. Advances in information technology, in particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies have given all sorts of individual economic actors—consumers, investors, businesses—valuable new tools for identifying and pursuing economic opportunities, including faster and more informed analyses of economic trends around the world, easy transfers of assets, and collaboration with far-flung partners. (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.globalization101.org/What_is_Globalization.html, 5/31/08).
While globalization has arguably been in practice sense humans first left the African continent, as the above definition highlights, Information Technology is brining about in years what once took generations. Considering the impact that industry, politics and education can have on the global community, and conversely, how international activity can affect local organizations, policy—or more specifically needs identification, analysis, planning and decision-making—must now include a global perspective. While technology provides unprecedented access to information and instant communication, specific techniques that can provide for effective information gathering and data analysis have yet to be defined: we may now have the tools, however we lack the techniques. As a result, many organizations struggle with filtering vital information, that can contribute to solving both local as well as global problems, from the noise that may interfere with effective policies and practices, or even worse, counter the organization’s strategic objectives.
To capitalize on the developments in technology for effective policy-making, organizations should adopt polices that foster abstraction (iteration and incremental development), transparency (openness, honesty and sharing), self-organizing groups, collaboration, decentralization (independence, individualism), and emergence (frequent testing and evidence-based feedback): what has collectively become known as Agile Methods.
In 1997, Eric Raymond, published “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The paper proved to be revolutionary with what is known as the “hacker culture,” or software developers. At the time of its publication the development and distribution of computer software was tightly controlled by private interests who, after expending significant financial and intellectual resources in programming, testing and marketing of a new application, controlled its release and use to ensure a return on their investments. To protect their intellectual property and the products it created, the software industry sought and enforced copyrights, even patented their products, and controlled distribution through strict licensing agreements. Raymond likened this business model and software development process to a cathedral’s construction: there was a formal plan, created by a few recognized experts, that directed the development of not only the features, but the functionality and even how the final work would be used.
Considering software engineering’s relatively late emergence as an industry, business models and operational polices, logically, grew out of and aligned with existing traditional organizations: those with established histories in management practices and policies. Leadership (vision, mission and values) and planning (objectives, goals and targets) were identified as the critical factors for achieving success. Organizations, managed centrally by recognized experts who set direction, invested significant resources in strategic planning prior to beginning operations in order to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats or “SWOT.” The results establised the polices of an organization and thus how they interacted with the global community.
In his paper Raymond argued that software development would be better served through a bazaar-like development process where a formal plan for development—the strategic plan—does not exist, rather, polices, practices, even the final products, are created by self organizing groups as they are discovered and described by actual end-users. Essentially, the organization would develop at the same pace that end-users could articulate it. Fundamental to this model would be policies that fostered transparency into the software source code, the statements or declarations that provide instructions to a computer, and collaboration among software developers who share their ideas and innovations. These, Raymond believed, would lead to higher quality software (fewer bugs or errors), greater functionality (more features and tools) and even decreased development times. “Given enough eyeballs,” Raymond stated, “all bugs are shallow”, or more formally, “given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.”
Raymond’s ideas, what has become know as “Open Source” in the technology industry, resulted in an immediate response in the software development community. The Web browser software developer Netscape announced on January 22nd 1998, partly due to Raymond’s presentation (Tiemann, Michael. “History of the OSI” Open Source Initiative 9/19/2006. 5/30/08), that it planned to release the source code of its popular Web browser Navigator, creating the Open Source project Mozilla. Today, according to Net Application’s Market Share Report (www.netapplications.com 5/31/08) the free and open source Mozilla web browser, Firefox, is second in use (18%) to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (75%) while Netscape Navigator, despite acquisition by Time Warner/AOL claims less than one percent of the web browser market. While the web browser wars can be directly tied to Raymond’s work, other Open Source projects such as the computer operating system Linux and the World Wide Web server software Apache have also seen success despite abandoning traditional business and development practices and adopting policies based on openness. According to a survey carried out by ZDNet.co.uk, “A clear majority of those surveyed, 81 percent, ran Windows Server, with Linux (of the Red Hat or Suse flavors) the next most used OS, at 50 percent [Note, the discrepancy in total percentage (130%) is due to the fact that many organizations run multiple operating systems].” (Flood, Gary. “The server OS: Present and future trends.” ZDNet.co.uk. 5/30/08). The latter example, Apache, leads the Web server market with a 50% share with Microsoft’s proprietary and traditionally managed Web Server, Internet Information Server (IIS) capturing 35% of the user base.
These initiatives, Apache, Linux and Mozilla as well of hundreds of other open source products, share common principles—policies—emphasizing openness and community for decision-making within a global market: an approach, I believe, is applicable outside software engineering and appropriate for business and government. Again as Raymond stated, “given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone” and there can be no larger “beta-tester and co-development base” than the global community, turning the attributes associated with globalization from a challenge to an opportunity. Policy-making and planning should be done by decentralized individuals, working within self-organizing groups, who assess current organizational and operational issues within transparent organizations, identifying needs and solutions as they emerge through a process of continuous feedback and interactive and incremental development.
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