Emergence and Sedimentation

Modernity, once so successful, bold, and ambitious, was built on the myth of a consistent and well-organized world, the structure of which was to be discovered. In the end of the XIXth and during the XXth century, as a result of its success, it met in many domains of human thought and knowledge, limitations which revealed this myth.

Software is a late-comer in human activity, and is still young. It often retraces the past mistakes of human infancy. The myth of modernity is what we know in SCM as the /main/LATEST syndrome.

Order, stability, are conditions we need in order to be able to invest our effort. We have to build them. To agree upon, and to maintain them. In order to do so, and as right heirs of the bright past of modernity, we want to use the same conceptual tools, which were so useful in history. We want to establish a common, a shared view of both the information we can rely upon, and of the problems we need to tackle next.

Metaphorically, the former must sediment down, and the latter emerge. Managing by differences is focusing on the tip of the iceberg, the signal, after having secured away the mass of it, to minimize the noise.

We cannot however be naive anymore, and careless: we have to take responsibility and to commit to sustaining these views, to know them as the results of our decisions, and to assert their validity with our achievements. We have to manage them.

-- MarcGirod - 28 Aug 2007