Status Report

At least every other week (in other words, every other post), I will post a status report for my dissertation research. So without further ado, here is the first table.

	Case 1		Case 2		Total		Remaining
	Counts	Percentage	Counts	Percentage	Counts	Percentage	Counts	Percentage
Interviews	26	100.0%	30	100.0%	56	100.0%	0	0.0%
Scheduled	20	76.9%	5	16.7%	25	44.6%	31	55.4%
Conducted	18	69.2%	5	16.7%	23	41.1%	33	58.9%
Transcried	10	38.5%	3	10.0%	13	23.2%	43	76.8%
Coded	1	3.8%	0	0.0%	1	1.8%	55	98.2%
Summarized	1	3.8%	0	0.0%	1	1.8%	5	98.2%

What can be immediately seen is that I have a lot of work to do!

At this point, I have identified 56 interviews that I will need to conduct. This number is most likely too low as I will likely need to conduct re-interviews of some people and new people will come into the picture. However, based on the interviews that I have identified so far, 56 is the right number. Of those, 31 remain to be scheduled, 33 have yet to be conducted, 10 others have been conducted but will need to be transcribed, and only 1 has been coded and summarized (but I will likely need to redo it).

The interviews can all be conducted by the end of January (7 per week, not counting those that are done before the EOY). I fortunately have an excellent transcriptionist that can work with me, so if those are done, I think I can have them back to me by the end of Feb. I will likely need to add another transcriptionist to keep from overburdening her, but that can be arranged. I can do one coding / analysis per day (Sat and Sun included) through the interview phase, but when that is done I hope to be up to 10 per week). Again counting revisions, I think I can be done with the coding phase by mid-March. If so, I will have about 5 weeks to really put something together for the April 30th deadline.

At first, this seems like a very bleak picture, but believe it or not, I can still graduate in May if I really push, but August is looking far more likely. Then, the deadline is July 9th for a first draft, July 30 for the final.

The table also shows that I have conducted 77% of the interviews for the first case site, with only six others to go -- and I will schedule these later this week, likely not finishing them until after the first of the year. By the EOY, I will have 5-8 more interviews transcribed and 10-15 of them coded and summarized. This means that during January, I can put together the first case site and try to write a first set of results.

So, it is not quite as bad as it sounds - but it is close to ominous...unless I get off my ass RIGHT NOW!

ICIS Doctoral Consortium Review Notes

This is the last night for the ICIS Doctoral consortium and so far, I am very happy to have come here--overall. There are good and bad points, which I want to cover here very briefly. I will have more notes later, but this is the high points.

Good:
Alan Dennis' comments about setting goals was great. His plan of doing one publication submission per month (including resubmissions, revisions, etc.) is a good way to get a good research stream going. I may need to modify that somewhat to enable more work in the summers and during the Christmas break, but in general that is an excellent plan.

He also suggested that you should only have one project that you are working on at a time (maybe two) - and spend 15 mins per day EVERY DAY on each active project...even if that is just writing one paragraph.

Lynne Markus advised us to look at three questions when writing/planning qualitative papers:
1. What are the three most interesting results, findings, conclusions, etc.?
2. How would you write a paper about each one?
3. What literature is relevant to those questions individually?

There are many, many other good comments that I will include later.

Bad:
Lynne and Laurie pooh-poohed my research, which was very disappointing. More on that later, but the essence of it is that I need to do several things: (1) clear up the concept of an ecosystem, especially compared to technological communities (wade), Brian Butler's work on virtual communities, and other similar things; no surprise there, but it still shocked me how negative they seemed to be and how they were displeased with my insufficient lit review; (2) capital may not seem to be a great way to look at it -- instead think of resources, which I sort of disagree with, but LM said it matches the notion of an ecosystem to think of resources.

There were other negative comments, but I do not feel like looking them up at the present time.

As I said, more later -- but it is clear that I have a lot, lot, LOT of work to do!!

What is the point?

I established this blog in order to track the progress that I am making (or not making) toward my Dissertation completion. I hope that it becomes a cathartic means of analyzing my thoughts and feelings toward this process.

Currently, I have a target of collecting and analyzing 50-60 interviews from members of two open source software ecosystems (JBoss and Pentaho). So far, I have collected 17 interviews, but very little analysis has been done. I have a target of graduating in May 2007, but that will require me to collect, analyze, and writeup the dissertation (in about 100 pages or less) and revise portions of my dissertation proposal by April 9, which is a scant 22 weeks away. Thus, I have a secondary goal of completing my work by Summer 2007, which requires a version be sent by July 9. I think I can make the Spring (if I get really, really busy), but the Summer one is a no-brainer.

Besides, I have a job to go to at the University of Dayton on August 16th.

So, it's time to get to work!!!