Invitations and Becomings

It's just after five, and I've been lying in bed for the last couple of hours with ideas running through my head about the possibility of writing a radical sociology of intranets. Let me start to sketch what I have in mind...

In my work as a training manager for a CMS replacement project, I'm constantly exposed to the tensions between the needs of client businesses and the development of a rational and secure content management system. In essence these are negotiations between the development of an effective technology and the working lives of the people who will be using it everyday.

In the development lifecycle these tensions are dealt with in three ways:

• the tensions that characterised the old system - and which have made replacing it attractive - are compiled, and overcoming them becomes a requirement of any replacement system
• they arise as problems (usually change requests) raised by key stakeholders as the solution design is released to the business
• they are expressed during training, UAT or in response to communications about the system 

The thought that drives this project is that some of these tensions are not just flaws in the system, but are fundamental to the intranet as a part of the institutional structure of the workplace.

I would like to investigate these tensions in three different ways:

• articulating these tensions in some general form
• finding different examples of the ways they become explicit, and the implicit and ad hoc responses to them
• proposing design patterns for mediating their effect

It's the last of these that makes this project different from an academic thesis. I can already imagine writing it as an e-book with actual mock-ups of these patterns.