(2019-11-18) Eghbal Reimagining The Phd

NadiaEghbal: Reimagining the PhD. I think you can be a researcher in any setting!

I recently decided to wrap up my time at Protocol Labs, and along with it, my time in open source research.

I’ve spent the past 4+ years looking at how open source software is produced, from an economic and anthropological lens. The last thing I’ve been working on is a book, and now that the manuscript is nearly done, I’ve decided it’s time for something new

As I’m seeing more independent researchers crop up around town, I thought it might be helpful to share details on how I made this work. If you’re interested in exploring your own research inquiry through non-traditional means, here’s how I did mine

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)
• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)
• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing, consolidation (funded by Protocol Labs)

I funded my work during this time with two grants from the Ford Foundation. We met by chance, through an interviewee I’d also cold emailed

I published a 143-page report called Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure, which capped off this first phase of research.

Fundamentally, I think of that report as a problem statement: it was a hypothesis, based on the conversations I’d had, and my goal was to get more people asking questions

I didn’t write anything until I felt like I had something to say, which came after roughly six months of research. I published a blog post about it with my hypothesis

A few friends have commented that writing a book seemed, for me, like the equivalent of writing a dissertation

Phase II: Testing

The money was materially useful, but not substantial. Getting Ford’s involvement was more important to me as a source of validation

Phase III: Refining

I was adamant about not wanting to be in a “strategic” or research role, because the whole reason I wanted to be there was to get hands-on experience. I also didn’t want to be an evangelism role, because I felt like I’d already done a lot of that in Phase I.

Rather than publishing content, my output at GitHub focused on building programs that would help GitHub, and the maintainers who used it, talk to each other more regularly, then taking those insights back into product.

After drumming up some initial interest in the problem, I had to figure out where to take it. I’d gotten to know a few folks at GitHub, and after I started writing in public, we began to discuss the possibility of working there.

In the end, though, I wanted to maximize for impact. I cared about staying close to developers, and I felt that working at GitHub would be the fastest way to learn, because I’d get to test my ideas in a pragmatic setting

Somewhere during my time at GitHub, I realized that my views had evolved quite a bit. In translating some of my earlier hypotheses into practice, not all of them had stood up to the test

Even among people where we were all on the same page about the problem, some second order of vocabulary was missing.

Because my long-term interest was to help shape public conversation on this topic, I decided to leave GitHub and go back to synthesizing the things I’d learned since Phase I. Luckily, Juan Benet (another person I’d met via cold email early on) offered me the time and space to do that research at Protocol Labs.

This past year and a half was perhaps materially the most comfortable, but emotionally the most grueling phase of my research, because it was so isolating.

I didn’t have a manager at Protocol Labs when I started, and the company is fully distributed, so I had to find other ways to create accountability for myself

But, after continuing to have trouble expressing myself when talking to others about open source, I decided to write up a longer piece. My goal was to unwind some of the underlying theory and frameworks that I thought would be useful to have in these conversations. Eventually, this turned into a book.

...seen how publishing Roads & Bridges as a report gave it a surprising amount of legitimacy. Back then, I genuinely didn’t think anyone would read it, and almost felt embarrassed to have spent so much time writing a long, self-indulgent piece. Three years later, people cite that report more than any of my blog posts.

A PhD for independent research

The most important thing that I think academia has to offer is giving researchers a stable career path to explore long-term questions. I’ve come to appreciate this more after my last phase of work.

Write your own curriculum

Over the course of my work, several professors reached out about considering a PhD. I seriously entertained the idea for a bit. What I most cared about was having an impact on public discourse, so I was definitely open to doing a PhD if I thought it would be a better path to getting there

One professor told me that, after 4-6 years in the program, I’d be “considered a credible expert” in this topic. But my research focus was so narrow that there weren’t really many other experts in my field to begin with.

here are some of the building blocks that I found important to include.

Have a target audience in mind that you’re trying to reach (it might be other academics!), and go spend time with them

Stay close to your subject

Work in public

Build your own support network

Find ways to hold yourself accountable

Resist the temptation to play “research dress-up”

Create artifacts that work for your audience

Feel free to create whatever artifact you think will best reach your target audience (which might also mean academic papers, by the way!). I was mildly afraid of GitHub when I started, but I learned that open source developers use GitHub repositories for discussions, so I published some of my work that way. (A few other examples I like: Nicky Case publishes her ideas as games, and Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak are writing about quantum computing in an interactive readable format designed to improve retention.)

If I want to cite a developer’s tweet or Taylor Swift lyrics instead of an academic paper, I can just do that. Try not to overthink what “doing research” means. You’re just a person, learning in public, about a topic that other people find interesting.

If you’re not on a tenure track, getting paid to do research (even for people who work in academia!) is frequently gig-based, like being a musician or an actor. It can be a nervewracking setup, because you tend to move laterally, rather than vertically, between organizations. (One person I spoke to referred to this as “research Frogger”: you’re hopping from place to place, living in mortal fear of the day that some CFO type starts to run the numbers and wonder what the heck you’re doing there.)

The upside of a gig-based lifestyle is that it gives you constraints, and when you’re doing something that’s somewhat illegible to others, constraints are a good thing

I think you can be a researcher in any setting! (Here’s a fun example: astrophysics PhDs who love working at Stitch Fix.)