Shambling Rambling Babbling » (dis)continutity

UGA Homepage and Columns: More Ego News

codonnell — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:07:54 +0000

Ok, it has now been removed from the front page of UGA.edu, so I feel a bit more comfortable posting about it. About a week and a half ago I was featured in the UGA Faculty Newspaper, Columns. This was then turned into a lead story on the UGA Website. What this meant was that for a brief moment (about 4 days) I was on the front page of the UGA website. Eeek! Well, I’ve finally been cycled off in favor of something about Second Life, which I don’t mind in the least. For those interested, however, I’ve posted a PDF here of the site while I was on it. I’m sure everyone is dying to see more photos of me, so I must not disapoint… That was sarcasm.

UGA Front Page Archive

Georgia Trend and Ego News

codonnell — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:57:45 +0000

So I feel compelled to blog it when it happens, but Georgia Trend recently published an article about the growing industry in Georgia. You can read the particular quote from me after the break. But what I’ve been screaming about since arriving here is that the real opportunity for Georgia is the opportunity to make a different kind of industry. This is why I’m so interested in independent game development. Rather than importing existing large companies, Georgia has an opportunity to really forge their own industry. Ian Bogost’s comments seem to capture this far better than mine did, but at their heart are close to my own:

“Most graduates go off to California or Seattle or wherever the industry is thriving. A lot of them would happily stay here if there was more of an industry to graduate into,” says Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost, researcher, critic, designer and author of the recently published Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. “We’re not going to be viewed as a serious player in the industry until we see some successful products released, with critical acclaim and all that stuff.”
…
“Georgia doesn’t need to create an industry. It needs to create a unique industry,” he says. “We should be looking at what a regional games industry would look like. Every state is looking for ways to capitalize on this new form of entertainment, but the opportunity we haven’t cashed in on is the specific voice of Atlanta or Georgia or the Southeast.

Ultimately, this is the thing right? How do we make something that represents GA? In my case, how can we make something that represents UGA, Athens, etc? All of this ultimately goes to what Jason Della Rocca was talking about when he talked about clusters. OK, now for the ego quote:

Casey O’Donnell, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College, has first-hand experience with that setup. He was with Vicarious Visions, a successful game studio in upstate New York, when it was acquired by industry mega-corporation Activision.

“Vicarious Visions went from 75 employees to 150 in the time I was there,” says O’Donnell, who came to UGA last August to build a program that will include video games as a major focus. “But that one studio has now been responsible for parenting four or five other studios as talented people left to start their own companies, all of them making money.

“That’s what we need to foster, a community of small, independent studios. To me, more people making a living, as opposed to a few multi-billionaires dominating the industry, is the desirable scenario.”

More to come I suppose.

A Blast from my Academic Past…

codonnell — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:33:57 +0000

My Google Alert for “Casey O’Donnell” or Google Ego Monitor notified me this morning of the re-emergence of my essay for the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. I wrote an essay entitled, “Making an Open Source Case for Offshoring.” Because the essay was shorter, short on data beyond my own observations, and a bit risque, it was labeled a “Commentary” piece, which I was not opposed to. It was a spin off an elaboration on an earlier essay that was somewhat schizophrenic, which was published in First Monday. That piece was titled, “A Case for Indian Insourcing: Open Source Interest in IT Job Expansion.” That essay was published along with several other essays from a 4S Meeting in Paris, France. Because it was schizophrenic, I broke it into two separate essays. One of those was the IEEE Commentary and the second was published in the IGI Global edited book, “Handbook of Research on Open Source Software.” That chapter was titled, “The Labor Politics of Scratching an Itch.” In the end, breaking the essay apart and expanding upon each section made each piece work better and I’m happy with the way it turned out. It is just funny what a Sunday morning Ego Alert will cause you to go back and investigate.

Actual citations are posted after the jump, if desired.

O’Donnell, Casey. 2007. “Commentary: Making an Open Source Case for Offshoring.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 50.2:85-87.
O’Donnell, Casey. 2004. “A Case for Indian Insourcing: Open Source Interest in IT Job Expansion.” First Monday 9.11.
O’Donnell, Casey. 2007. “The Labor Politics of Scratching an Itch.” pp. 460-467 in Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives, edited by Kirk St.Amant and Brian Still. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.