Situated Software
Clay Shirky’s latest NEC essay is entitled Situated
Software, and it deals with the phenomenon of software written
by—and for—a very specific subset of the potential user
population. I find that I spend a lot of time writing software, both
for my job and for personal projects, which fits this model. I have
dozens of software projects which I’ve spent a good deal of time on,
yet are far too specific in problem domain (and user group) to even
bother trying to release to a wider audience.
I just last week wrote
about one of my situated
software projects from 1998.
Arguably my best example, however, is dsandler.org itself, full of
“small pieces, loosely joined”
and definitely serving a “specific social group” (criteria described in
the article).