Web Operations

Trading Zones and Apologies

Developers, sys admins, network engineers, and database administrators are all "technologists" with different expertise, and these coarse distinctions could be subdivided further. Building and maintaining a massive web application (remember, the infrastructure is the application) requires input and optimizations from all these perspectives.

"Trading zones" is a metaphor credited to Peter Galison's explanation of physics and engineering disciplines working together to produce particle detectors and radar:

Two groups can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged; they may even disagree on the meaning of the exchange process itself. Nonetheless, the trading partners can hammer out a local coordination, despite vast global differences. In an even more sophisticated way, cultures in interaction frequently establish contact languages, systems of discourse that can vary from the most function-specific jargons, through semispecific pidgins, to full-fledged creoles rich enough to support activities as complex as poetry and metalinguistic reflection. (Galison, P. [1997]. Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 783.)

When disparate groups have a common interest in an exchange for mutual benefit, the language they need to work together emerges from working together. Of course, this emergence can be a clumsy and painful process, but a facilitator ...