Sun, 23 Feb 2003 18:13:48 GMT

Facilitating disruptive technology development.

Hugh Blackmer, a Science Librarian at Washington & Lee University with a very wide array of interests, has written a very nice piece called “Making room for disruptive and emergent technologies“. I found the following paragraph especially evocative of the problems facing boat-rockers:

Each campus seems to have a few people whom others identify as visionaries and pioneers, but their niches are not predictable: sometimes they are professors, sometimes librarians, sometimes IT or computing people. Their penchant for experiment and innovation is often applied at the outer fringes of their nominal position or assignment. Some are lone wolves, but many pursue collaborations, often across administrative boundaries. They share a common problem: where can they turn for support for their efforts? As rogue operatives and boundary-traducers, innovators are often ineligible for resources within their administrative units, so they must either attract extraordinary support internally (from contingency funds or generous programs), or divert time into applications for external funding.

[Seb's Open Research]

nifty, this is sort of one of my main areas of interest, applying technology for institutional change..