One of many posts on my Readiness Assessment. As a reminder of the ground rules, this is a solo assessment, so while I’m allowed to think out loud on my blog, I can’t ask for or get (intellectual) help. Cookies and emotional support are, however, welcome.

I've been struggling to write tonight, so I decided I'd step back and see if that helped (and launch into something if it did, and read the last 2 papers I've got to read if it didn't).

The best thing about having a paper draft is that I now have a clear picture of what "done" looks like and exactly what i need to get there. My current to-do list has 46 things on it; half are content-items I need to write, the other half are -- well...

  • 1 is the citations list.
  • 2 are the appendices (the original questions and a collection of all my blog posts).
  • 20 are pictures I need to draw, and I know exactly what they'll look like.

About those 23 content items: some have been written but not incorporated into the paper, some haven't yet been written, and some are so tiny they're knock-offable in a few minutes.

Tiny

  1. #CITATION - and summary for Changemakers project
  2. #CITATIONS - of studies done on FOSS groups
  3. #CITATION - and summary for the "committing to mainline" FOSS pattern

Gotta find and repurpose stuff I've already written about

  1. #BLOG – cultural norms and practices of radical transparency (from writings on/by FOSSers, including that membership is low-barrier) -- I've written a lot of this in various conference papers and blog posts.
  2. #BLOG definition of affordances
  3. #CITE the affordances bit on how actors reciprocally afford each other (blog post)
  4. #BLOG affordances stuff – distinction between transparency and participation, yada yada. (blog post)
  5. #BLOG explain CoP (term paper)
  6. #BLOG LPP (term paper)
  7. #BLOG CogApp shop floor access (term paper)
  8. #BLOG Summarize workings at the community level, CoP , LPP, SitCog, CogApp (everything should fit; I wrote a lot about this in a term paper but need to dig it out again)

Gotta write

  1. #BLOG – purpose list of various paradigms (kinda partly written, but scattered; my thoughts are not yet clear)
  2. #BLOG explain how not commiting to mainline coexists with the ability to fork and make your own mainline – you can create your own forum for participation; it's enabled by transparency, and absorbence-back into mainline is also enabled by transparency. Tie to the Four Freedoms, which you may have explained earlier.
  3. #BLOG what are the things in the RTR environment
  4. #BLOG what are the people/actors in the RTR environment
  5. #BLOG expert/core distinction – who learns what? PE – what's up, CE – howseen? CN – how done? PN – what is?
  6. #BLOG ZPD (I have some existing written stuff, but not enough)
  7. #BLOG Summarize workings at the individual level, social learning, individual learning differences, self-efficacy, self-determination, goal orientation, volition, attribution theory (if something on this list does not make sense, just cut it; if this entire section drives you mad, cut it)
  8. #BLOG abundance mentality, with citations
  9. #BLOG methods list with explanations, plus what each method is good at seeing, and its limitations (I've read this, the notes are on paper and need to be typed)
  10. #BLOG paradigm summary with historical developments
  11. #BLOG the four freedoms as affordances
  12. #BLOG my dissertation proposal as a case study of RTR

If I complete these lists, draw the pictures and put in the citations and compile the appendices, then... the rest is gravy. Proofreading and editing, going over old blog posts and adding new ideas in... of course, the trouble is that I'm running out of days. But now that I have my writing sprints lined up... it seems... achievable. Maybe this is crazy, but I want to try to check off all but five of the things on this list before I go dancing Friday night (sanity preservation dancing -- late night blues in Chicago).

Then Saturday will be about driving back, taking care of those last 5 things, and drawing. And Sunday can be about compiling everything -- citations, putting in the pictures, etc -- into a shippable document. And Monday will be all about the bonus round. I mean, that's not exactly how it's probably going to go, but that's how it could go.

I'm going to tackle the paradigms stuff offline right now, and then I'm going to sleep, because I'm freakin' dead.