The Share Experiment
Posted By: Jordan ParsonsRecently I was invited to participate in the Share Experiment, a development project by Yannick Assogba, an MIT media lab student. It was a week long processing programming experiment where the participants shared their code in effort to study how the code is used and how people work off of it. Here is the official information, before my thoughts on the project.
It is an IDE that automatically shares all the code you write with everyone else that is using Share, and keeps track of how that code is used. Thus allowing you to see the network that grows around code you contribute to, borrow from, or just happen to be interested in.
Share is an IDE built to explore some ideas around loosely bound co-operation between members of a community of practice, such as a community of programmers.
As you write code in share the software periodically syncs with a server to upload your sketches as well as download other users sketches to your hard drive. This allows you to browse through other people’s code and borrow things that you think may be helpful to your project. As you do this share tracks the copy-pasting of code, allowing you to see where code you contribute may go and how it is used, and also allowing you to browse the repository of code based on the relationships between code and the people who wrote it. Share also include ways of creating references to projects even if no code actually moves.
Share also integrates a processing run time allowing you to compile and run sketches directly from the tool. While share itself is language agnostic our current experiment focuses on processing.
Share is the thesis project of Yannick Assogba a masters student at the MIT Media Lab in the Sociable Media Group advised by Judith Donath.
My thoughts
First let me start with how much I enjoyed share. I know some might think it was a bit silly, but I thought it was very interesting. I think the way people interact and share information is a pretty fascinating subject, couple that with my interest in processing and for me it lead to a very interesting project.
The IDE was fairly simple when compared on a feature level to the standard processing IDE. Several features were missing, but ones more central to the project were added. The ability to tag code was a fairly important part of the IDE. Code could be tagged by sketch, author, or file. As you wrote code it was indexed an tagged as originating from you, but if you copied code from another persons sketch, the code was marked as such. This coupled with the ability to comment in references (for ideas), created an interesting web which was viewable on its own page.
The goal of the project was to create your own new version of pong. I was amazed with the talent of the people present. There were some really interesting re-imaginings, and skillful execution. Lets just leave it to say that I was not among that group. The users of share were spread between amateurs, like myself, and people who are very skilled. We all came from different backgrounds which created an interesting group of skill sets.
The IDE was updated frequently updated, most changed were new libraries and bug fixes. Over all the software end of it seemed, solid, but a little short on features. That is to be expected although, the IDE was not the main point of the experiment.
Overall I thought it was an entertaining and informative experiment, and I hope the best for Yannick and his work.
The Gallery of Share Work
Share
September 1, 2009 at 7:42 pm | No Comments »
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