NYIT? story of the architect who paved the paths a year after the school opened-- to see where the students walked. The notion of systems following real use.
See similar CIO story here: http://www.cio.com/archive/051506/essential_technology.html?page=2
"There is an old story about a clever university planner who waited to pour concrete sidewalks on the new campus until students had worn paths between the buildings." --Mark Cooper, "Moving the Sidewalks," CIO, 5/15/06
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And here: http://www.itcinstitute.com/display.aspx?id=98
Eye on Compliance: Paving Cow Paths
Three recommendations for leveraging your compliance efforts as requirements evolve
IT Compliance Institute web site, 9/7/04
By Adrian Bowles
When I was an undergraduate student, I had the opportunity to witness one of the great design processes of the century. Or perhaps it was just one of those lucky breaks occasionally caught by poor planners. My university completed the construction of a new lecture hall near the center of campus before students entered in the fall semester. Although there was a network of sidewalks around the perimeter of campus, no sidewalk was routed to many of the entrances of this building, which housed the largest classes and hence had the most traffic throughout the year.
The new hall remained virtually disconnected throughout the rainy season, then through the snowy season, and on into the season of mud. Well-worn paths emerged throughout the year, marking optimal routes to other significant destinations. Had they been left unpaved, I am sure that archeologists would have had little trouble finding the campus epicenter based on the artifacts strewn along the way. The following spring, however, the most-used paths were paved and thereafter became the official routes between termini.
Years later, I spoke with a member of the faculty who assured me that this was all part of the grand plan, and that the lack of concrete paths was part of a process. The reported rationale for the campus sequence was that it was more effective to let the students find the "natural" paths and optimize their own travel than it would have been to predict them and then have students find shortcuts after the fact.
Other than the fact that some new, unauthorized routes were ultimately carved out of the grass as additional buildings were constructed, rendering existing concrete redundant, the plan worked well.
Recalling this history recently reminded me of many tales of paving cow paths to formalize roads in European villages and also provided a plausible explanation for the layout of downtown Boston.
An adaptive process can also work well for IT compliance strategists, who would like to know the ultimate process in advance of regulatory intervention, but must deal with the reality that things change over time.
I offer three recommendations for leveraging your compliance cow paths without locking yourself into a process that ultimately paves everything as requirements evolve:
Don't pave the cow paths unless the new cows are a lot like the old ones. This is really an admonition to keep it loose, and look for lightweight fixes unless the result is likely to help in similar requirements for more regulations (like data retention requirements common across several governance regulations, or breach-reporting for privacy regulations).
When you do pave, use a biodegradable solution. Requirements may change, and locking yourself into a solution for a single requirement can be expensive if new requirements indicate alternative solutions. Using a standards-based approach to compliance infrastructure is a good place to start. For example, adopting ISO 17799 as a framework for all security initiatives provides structure without limiting flexibility.
Know when to follow the herd. At a minimum, informed IT executives should know where their peers are headed and either join them on the path or have a good reason—defensible before the regulators—for going alone. In the muddy campus scenario, there were many paths forged by rugged individuals, but once they converged into a paved "best practice," the local enforcers looked askance on new pioneers.
The common thread, of course, is that a compliance architecture and infrastructure must be flexible, because the emerging requirements are only partially predictable. Simple as it sounds, flexible IT is never the end state of evolution. It is the result of planning and investment. Planning for flexibility is far more rewarding than hoping for it."
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And here: http://www.minorityrapport.com/2005/08/social_urban_pl.html
August 07, 2005
Scope, Segmentation and Social Urban Planning
"I've written a number of times that social software is powerful because it makes natural social processes more efficient. If we already gravitate towards 'webs' of contacts in the real world, search and database technologies simply allow those webs to become bigger. If we already rely upon certain friends' movie recommendations, collaborative filters such as Yahoo's Movie Recommendations simply expands our scope. Those are all fairly 'explicit' social processes, though. We often 'specify' professional contacts by exchanging business cards, for example, and one way or another we decide whose advice to rely upon for movie recommendations. What about 'implicit' social processes -- what could we learn about social software by looking for those out there in the world?
A neat example springs to mind. Imagine a sizeable plot of empty land, and imagine further that you're assigned to prepare it for public use. You'd probably like to maintain as much healthy (read: un-trampled) 'green space' as you can manage, but some paving will be necessary. How are you going to organize the plot? Maybe you'll try a grid pattern because on-average, a grid ensures the most efficient path between any two points. But you'd realize that most people will decide to 'cut across' sections of the grid when doing so seems expedient. So anticipating this, maybe you'd pave a tighter grid than you had first planned. The process would repeat and soon you might conclude that paving the entire plot is the only solution. But that can't be right.
Actually, some planners capitalize on social processes to avoid precisely this problem. They don't lay any pavement at all for the first season, waiting instead to interpret the most trampled areas as paths favored by the public. By paving those paths, irregular though they may be, planners have begun to intuit that they can minimize most people's travel-time while saving the remaining grass from excessive abuse. Some even say the streets of Boston were actually fashioned after cowpath ruts worn hundreds of years ago, although there's some disagreement there. More recently, I understand that the paths along University of Maryland's McKeldin Mall (pictured below) were defined by the worn footpaths of travelling students after a snowstorm. Notice the irregularity of McKeldin's paths. Maybe it's fair to consider these plots which have bubbled-up from users to planners to be examples of social urban planning.
For those who will allow my stretched metaphor to stretch just a little farther, let's consider the results of planning a campus mall or an entire city by implicit expression. I have visited UMD a number of times, and I've made my way across the mall fairly quickly. I have also had the pleasure of driving in Boston, which has uniformly been a disaster. Accustomed as I am to Philadelphia's regular grid pattern, missed turns in Boston have sometimes almost doubled my travel time.
Maybe the key insight here is that social processes -- implicit and explicit -- are most powerful when constrained in scope (although not necessarily in scale). McKeldin mall is intuitive enough to navigate because the vast majority of travellers move between similar start and endpoints (say, dormitories in one general direction and lecture halls in the other general direction). But the logic of wayward tourists in Boston has exceptionally little to do with that of long-dead cowhands, so the result of that social collaboration is spectacularly inefficient.
So perhaps, for many applications, social software optimally considers a limited scope of information. Such a tendency might explain the Balkanization we're seeing on some social software platforms. One recent stat notes, for example, that Google's Orkut is populated by greater than 41% Brazillians, versus less than 25% Americans. That would be great news for those of us who try to value these platforms based on growth within constrained user demographics (Doostang, TheFaceBook). It might be damning for those of us who hope to grow the scope of user bases by means of viral marketing (MySpace, 360).
In the coming weeks, it will be important to consider how well that jives with my earlier prediction of a unified profile space." --Posted by Jon Turow on August 07, 2005
See McKeldin Mall in the UMD article on landscape architecture, here:
http://www.facilities.umd.edu/MMD/Files/11x17_HC_Cover-and-Core_1mar04.pdf
and the folklore quote in the student campus tour guide applications ("Images") here: http://www.studentorg.umd.edu/mi/application.pdf (see p. 3)
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