Diffusion theory
Caroline Beebe, Jan Holloway · 1994
In our over 10 years of planning and producing publications at the computing center at Indiana University Bloomington, we've changed our publications strategy and the look of our publications many times.Probably the most important dynamic behind these changes is evolution.In the early days of our computer center, our publishing group lacked a clear vision of our identity and our long-term mission.Our task was to respond to campus needs as we saw them.Over time, we evolved into a more complex group of specialists.Today we're helping lead the development of the university's server on the World Wide Web.In this paper we examine how we arrived at where we are now.Looking back, we see that the development of our publishing group has been driven in part by the growth of computer technology.But beyond that, we have no model for understanding what dynamics of computer center publishing will best position us to head into the future.As a solution, we combine models from the worlds of business and communications to derive some paradigms that help us understand some of the dynamics behind our growth.We combine the risk -> reward model from business with the source -> channel model from communications.We look at the paradigm that results in the context of diffusion and finally talk about some new strategies we're using to write about computing for an increasingly complex audience.