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Open Source

Snurb — Thursday 19 July 2018 22:20

Changing Models for Software Peer Production

Produsers and Produsage | Open Source | SM&S 2018 |

The next panel at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Mathieu O’Neill, who focusses on peer production in the sharing economy. How does peer production fit into the precarious, gig economy environment that has emerged over the past few years? Firms might devote some of their employee time to participation in peer production, but this also means that they lose control over their staff productivity for at least some of their time.

Mathieu’s focus here is on Debian, and his interest is in questions of power and legitimacy in this context. What’s emerges here is an ethical-modular organisational logic …

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Snurb — Friday 25 October 2013 02:22

The Emancipatory Potential of Tech Activism

Produsage Communities | Open Source | Internet Technologies | AoIR 2013 |

The final speaker in this first AoIR 2013 plenary is Christina Dunbar-Hester, whose focus is on activist technical projects - such as micropower radio stations or community wifi networks. The activists describe such activities with the Amish term of barnraising, highlighting the community empowerment and self-sufficiency aspects of such initiatives. The hope is to demystify technology and generate political engagement through further hands-on knowledge sharing.

There is a big difference in this in how technical expertise is seen as empowering (through sharing) rather than disempowering (through the emergence of knowledge elites). But there remains a strong white middle-class basis to …

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Snurb — Friday 26 August 2011 00:03

The Politics of Open Source

Politics | Open Source | ECPR 2011 |

Reykjavík.
We move on at ECPR 2011 to Andrea Calderaro, who zooms in on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement as a form of political struggle in the network society. It is important here to move beyond digital media as a mere tool, but to question the code itself; FOSS does this by open-sourcing code to allow greater interaction and transparency.

Closed code creates new forms of power inequality, and restrictions of access and participation are imposed through legislation which is supported and requested by software companies; this creates and maintains new elites. By contrast, FOSS delivers four …

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Snurb — Friday 7 May 2010 20:34

Open Access as Enabler for e-Democracy

Open Source | EDEM 2010 |

Krems.


The next keynote speaker at EDEM 2010 is Stevan Harnad, who shifts our focus to the question of open access to research - which is perhaps not a democratic issue in the strict sense of the word, but connects closely to questions of open government data, of course. The point of contention here is the unresolved question of how specialist knowledge connects with broad-based user-driven approaches to knowledge management - best examplified perhaps by Wikipedia. This is about user empowerment, but is not democratic in any traditional sense - and citizen engagement initiatives in e-democracy face similar challenges (especially in the context of complicated and controversially debated issues).

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Snurb — Wednesday 6 May 2009 02:11

Shared Tools in the Share Economy

Produsers and Produsage | Open Source | Internet Technologies | Produsage in Business | next09 |

Hamburg.


The final keynote on this first day of next09 is by Matthias Schrader of next09 conference organisers Sinnerschrader, who brings us back to the conference theme 'share economy'. What can we share, what do we want to share, what do we get out of sharing?

In the share economy, what we share are in the first place the tools we use; using (physical, mechanical) tools, of course, has long been seen as a uniquely human trait (although that belief has now been shown to be mistaken - other animals use tools, too). Perhaps the next step from here is the belief that only humans use tools to create other tools - that is, that only humans innovate by combining small, modular, commodity tools into more complex, composite, cutting-edge 'meta-tools'.

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Snurb — Saturday 20 October 2007 06:26

Communities? Wikipedia, YouTube, del.icio.us and Other Projects

Produsage Communities | Produsers and Produsage | Open Source | Streaming Media | Wikis | AoIR 2007 | aoir8 |

Vancouver.
The next session at AoIR 2007 begins with a paper by Ralph Schroeder and Mattijs den Besten on the section in the Pynchon wiki which has sprung up to collaboratively annotate Thomas Pynchon's much-anticipated novel Against the Day. There are some interesting statistics on how user participation shifted from the Pynchon mailing-list before the release of the book to the wiki once it was released; today, the wiki works as a reference source, as a tool highlighting connections to other Pynchon novels, and interpreting the content of the book. By July 2007, it had 200 contributors, 5000 entries, and contained some 400,000 words.

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Snurb — Thursday 22 June 2006 16:38

Towards More Democratic IT Infrastructures?

Open Source | Intellectual Property | Filesharing | ICA 2006 |

Dresden
We're continuing in a law and policy vein. The final session for today is on the potential for a democratisation of IT infrastructures. Dan Wielsch is the first presenter, focussing on infrastructure governance. He notes that the governance principles of distribution technology are changing - more people than ever before have access to the means of information production and exchange, drastically reducing entry costs to communication (also known as 'cheap speech'). This is markedly different from the previous industrial information economy, of course. In the new network information economy there is a serious increase in non-market content production, leading to more and more diverse content and content producers.

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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