James Howison in field observation mode at OSCon
James Howison's academic homepage
James Howison is post-doctoral associate at the Institute for Software Research at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. My post-doctoral mentor is Jim Herbsleb and I'm working with his research group on Coordination, Technology and Distributed Work.
In December 2008 I defended my PhD dissertation, advised by Kevin Crowston, at the School of Information studies at Syracuse University in upstate New York.
My broad research interest is technology and human collaboration. The majority of my work in this area has been through the Syracuse FLOSS research project and my dissertation:
- Alone Together: A socio-technical theory of motivation, coordination and collaboration technologies in organizing for free and open source software development.
The dissertation was awarded first runner up in the 2009 ICIS/ACM SIGMIS Dissertation Award competition and a Syracuse University Graduate School Dissertation Award.
- The dynamics of Free and Open Source Software with Kevin Crowston. The research team collects its work at the Syracuse FLOSS site. Our research so far has focused on the work practices of effective floss teams, the meaning of success in the FLOSS context, assessing social structure using social network analysis and a data and analysis sharing project called FLOSSmole.
During my PhD coursework I have pursued this interest in three other areas:
- “Why can't I manage my Academic papers like my MP3s” a study of the success of digital management of music contrasted to the difficulties of managing artifacts like academic papers and digital images. Abby Goodrum and I focus on solutions involving collaboration on metadata.
- Policy and advocacy as a collaborative task and its fit with supporting technologies. This research was with Derrick Cogburn in the Cotelco lab.
- Wireless Grids or distributed ad hoc resource sharing on mobile devices. This work was with Lee McKnight and the Wireless Grid lab. We published an introduction to Wireless Grids in IEEE Internet Computing
I, and my dissertation work, was selected for the 2007 ICIS Doctoral Consortium and the 2008 NSF-funded Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems. I have also been invited to present at industry conferences, including O'Reilly's first P2P conference (which became E-Tech) and the 2005 FOOCamp, LinuxAsia 2006, and the 2006 O'Reilly Open Source Conference.
In 1998 I received my honors degree (equiv. to M. Phil.) in economics and politics from the University of Sydney with a thesis entitled “Making the (cyber)world safe for Capitalism: a Political Economy of Cyberspace.” In 2001 I undertook graduate study in Software Engineering at the University of New South Wales before transferring to the Syracuse University School of Information Studies Ph.D. program in 2002.
My resume and publications are available.
You can contact me at james@howison.name or my cellphone +1 315 395 4056 or through the details on my v-card (which hopefully should just load into your address book. There's also an embedded microformat hCard in the html on this page.)
