Work to Be Done is my August 2007 Linux For Suits column in Linux Journal. In it I leverage the wisdom of Willard McCarty —
Particularly since the advent of the Web, our attention and energy have been involved with the exponential growth of digitization. The benefits for scholarship here are unarguably great. But as ever larger amounts of searchable and otherwise computable material become available, we don’t simply have more evidence for this or that business as usual. We have massively greater ecological diversity to take account of, and so can expect inherited ways of construing reality and of working, alone and with each other, to need basic renovation. Here is work to be done. It’s not a matter of breaking down disciplinary boundaries-the more we concentrate on breaking these down, the more they are needed for the breaking down. Rather the point is the reconfiguration of disciplinarity. From computing’s prospect at least, the feudal metaphor of turf and the medieval tree of knowledge in its formal garden of learning make no sense. We need other metaphors. Here is work to be done.
… into the challenge of VRM, where approximately 100% of What We Need To Do remains to be done.