My friend Sareeta is teaching a class on Technology in India, which looks fanstastic. If you are an undergraduate student at U of C, I would not miss it!

Here is the class overview:

Course Overview: Indian Technologies

How has technology shaped the Indian nation-state? How does our understanding of the meaning of technology change when discussed from the perspective of India? These two questions will serve as guides for the duration of this course on the relationship between technology and Indian political society. Seminal readings on technology inaugurate the course. Starting with Heidegger’s distinction between techné and technology, we will discuss the philosophical notion that those objects that mediate the relationship between humankind and nature contain both a promise and a threat—the promise of the full development of human capacities and the threat of the destruction of humanity. We will then consider Foucault’s analysis of techniques of political power through his concept of governmentality. This concept will reappear later in the course when we examine the cases of slum clearance, census, and population control during week 7’s discussion of Emma Tarlo’s Unsettling Modernities, an historical ethnography of the Emergency. Marx’s writings on alienation and industry labor round out the first set of readings, providing us with a theoretical tool kit with which to approach the particular histories of technology in India.
Gandhi and Nehru had in the main opposing views on the benefit of technology to India. The readings for the second and third weeks of class put their views in the context of Indian nationalism and the British Raj. From here we move on to investigate the causes and consequences of industrial and agricultural development by considering Akhil Gupta’s book about the Green Revolution and indigenous agriculture, Postcolonial Developments, and Veena Das’s seminal essay on the relationship of the industrial disaster in Bhopal to ideologies of the nation-state, “Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing”. The authors take up our twin themes of promise and threat and apply them to the future and fate of a free and democratic India.
Mid-quarter, we consider the development of India’s nuclear bomb. These readings reflect the place of science in the national imaginary of India, and situate developments in India in an international context. In the next set of readings, we explore how traditions of governance developed under the Raj vis-à-vis colonial subjects continue to influence the Indian state’s relationship to its subaltern citizens. The readings for this week both help expand the notion of technology to include techniques of enumeration and classification, and interrogate the nature of post-colonialism. Arvind Rajagopal’s ethnography, Politics after Television, illustrates the role of new technologies in political mobilization. It makes the argument that television as a tool of politics also corresponds to a new kind of voting Indian public. We will use these readings to open up a debate on the nature of democracy and its relationship to new technologies. The penultimate set of readings addresses a much-lauded but little understood technological phenomenon, the Indian software boom. The question of the legacy of Nehruvian technological projects will be revisited and the relationship of computer technologies to inequality will be explored.
In the final week, we will review materials covered in the course and test their limits. Marx’s writings on the British in India will be posed as a problem to any critique of technology that seeks to apply his theories unaltered to India, while Vidhu Verma’s article on gender and development will be used to re-think our readings on economic and technological progress.

Recently I wrote about a DRM and Anthropology debacle asking for help for a fellow friend whose files are basically in limbo-land, totally stuck, in a format that can’t be converted. I asked for comments but, brilliantly, did not open the comments. So here is one useful one passed along by email:

Here is a small, not completely cheap box which can take the protection code off the digital audio, at least at some situations of usefulness in a digital chain.

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/CO3-main.html

It could help your situation, I think. However, Sony, if you have been following the news recently, hires all sorts of incompetent people to design their DRM things.

So I think there is no way to find out for sure except to have someone pretty capable with digital audio try some things with your locked-out backups, probably just the other digital audio gear you have, and this box.

They may have to think a little to get it to work out, so find one person or more who like to be clever.

Good luck. And thanks for bringing this out…

update
And then I got this from Patrice R today, refering to the fact that many famous anthropologists lost thier data:

M.N. Srinivas “The Remembered Village” , I think the nicest case of lost date got
best book. And if I am not mistaken Fernand Braudel’s “La Mediterranee” is also the
result of lost data (FB in a German POW camp, MNS in an arson at Stanford)

So as part of my research and studies, I went from midwest, to west coast, and now I am back on the east where I used to live. While the midwest is home to one of the most prestigious law schools, there is very little activity related to technology, IP, and free speech issues–on academic or activist lines, at least in comparison to the other coasts.

On the west coast the activity was and still is overflowing but much of it was advocacy, policy related, or political in nature. Not to mention there are tons of grass roots initiatives related to this sort of stuff. Stanford law school and Boalt school of law however, guaranteed a consistent academic face.

Out on the east coast, I feel there is much less non-legal as well as perhaps legal (but I may be very wrong on that account) advocacy but the academic presence is very well developed, for example with seminar’s such as NYU’s Colloquium on Information Technology & Society and numerous conferences. One of the up and coming ones looks particiularly good,
Regulating Search: A Symposium on Search Engines, Law, and Public Policy. Certainly worth going to if you are around.

If you are interested in or work on F/OSS, NGO’s and Africa, then this event, Africa Source2 may be for you. Over the years Tactical Tech have hosted these source camps, and from what I hear, with each passing event, they make sure the next one is even better.

————————————————————–
Africa Source II -
Free and Open Source Software for Local Communities
Kalangala, Uganda – Jan 08-Jan 15, 2006
—————————————————————–
Please note that the deadline for sending in applications has been extended until October 24th, 2005.

We welcome applications from those working in Africa who are;
- campaigners, practitioners or project managers working within non-profits and interested in technology
- system administrators within NGOs, or acting as technical support to non-profits or community centres
- trainers and consultants to the non-profit sector, or those working in resource centres who are interested in technology

What is Africa Source II?
Africa Source II will be an eight day hands-on workshop aimed at building the technical skills of those working with and within NGOs on the continent. It will take place in one of the most beautiful parts of the Kalangala Island on Victoria Lake during the beginning of January 2006.
Africa Source II will focus on how technology, in particular Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) can be integrated into the project work of NGO’s. Over a hundred NGO Support Professionals and NGO Staff working at the local level across the region are expected at this meeting. Together with a handful of field leaders from Africa, Europe, North America and Asia, they will explore how technology can best serve the non-profit sector in Africa both in terms of access and content. I

We are still accepting applications! The deadline for sending in applications has been extended until October 24th, 2005.

So I use gmail for about 1/2 of my mail but it is becoming clear to me that it gobbles, like a big fat hungry turkey, my outgoing mail. I know of a number of occasions when my mail went out but was never received. I have had, for example, my dad check his spam folder but it was not there either. So not that gmail was all that grand (though handy at times), I think the days of gmail are soon to be over.

If you are into hacking and conning (as in going to conferences), the European hacker cons are about as good as they get and the CCC annual Congress is one such con. They are looking for submissions so if you can make it, well make it happen.

*****
The 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) is a four-day
conference ontechnology, society and utopia. The Congress offers
lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including
(but not limited to) information technology, IT-security, internet,
cryptography and generally a critical-creative attitude towards
technology and the discussion about the effects of technological
advances on society.

The Chaos Communication Congress is the annual congress of the Chaos
Computer Club e.V. (CCC). The Congress has established itself as the
“European Hacker Conference” assembling people from all over the world.

Even more important, the Congress is a great party bringing together the
brightest heads of a variety of cultures and interests strengthening the
idea of cross-culture inspiration and borderless networking. 22C3 is fun.

When I was in the Netherlands, I had the chance to have dinner with a fellow anthropolgist who studies geeks, Drs. Dorien Zandbergen , who I had met years earlier, briefly, really briefly in fact, while attending an ascii workshop. I gave her my email address just in case she ever wanted to talk shop. She emailed me years later, and by then I forgot I ever met her and just figured she found my name and address online. So I hooked her up with my pals in SF, found out that he was a she, and that I met her. Now there doing research as part of much larger project on spirituality and computers led by a bunch of Dutch researchers. Looks like good stuff and look forward to reading about her findings…

The folks at the Paris IMC translated and published an IMC piece I wrote a while ago. They have added a nifty translation notes section where they tackle those words that are difficult to translate from one language to the next, among other things.

I finally got around to signing up on SSRN where I published my dissertation chapter on Debian in article form. It was remarkably easy to do, which is always a nice +++ when throwing stuff online.

Now that I am nearly settled down, I think I will have time this coming week to put the whole dissertation online..

Joseph Reagle, a PhD candidate at NYU researching the Wikipedia community, recently wrote a blog post that asks a set of methodological and theoretical questions about the nature of his work, questions relevant to anyone that studies online communities: is it an ethnography of a current phenomenon, a set of oral histories, how does one portray and (or not) anonymize the people he works with? He raises my chapter on Debian (as well as some other work I would love to check out), in part, to address these questions and in particular, my strange treatment of sources. While I anonymize interviews as well as irc conversations (by changing names, for example), I use the names of the real developers when referring to public events and quote email mail lists but without the url. I think the lack of the last choice was indeed strange and perhaps not the wisest one. I think I made it clear that the source was a mailing list but for some reason I did not provide the URL to give it some visual consistency with the interview quotes, knowing that if someone wanted to find it, they could type a small section in google and retrieve the message. In retrospect, I should have just used the URL and when I post the paper on SSRN I will add them.

I had a really tough time deciding whether to anonymize everyone, just those folks that asked to be anonymized, or do something all together different. I have read material on F/OSS where even the names of projects were changed but the instant you googled the mailing list quote provided in the chapter, you could find out who wrote it and for what project. It just seemed silly and antiquated to try to make people and messages anonymous when they are in reality totally public documents and figures. If one wants to truly keep those elements anonymous, it is possible but it requires abstaining entirely from using mailing lists quotes verbatim, and using hefty paraphrasing. But for the ethnographer, who tends to make ample use of direct quotes, mailing lists represent such a pristine and succulent source of data, it would be almost sacrilegious to paraphrase instead of quote directly.

Internet Relay Chat is a bit tricker due to its semi-public nature. On the one hand, anyone can join a channel but on the other hand, most channels are not publicly logged. So I treated the source as private and changed the names of folks unless people published sections of conversation on a quote file (common for jokes).

I found probably some of the most interesting conversations and events on IRC because of its synchronous, realtime nature that was at once playful yet very intense. On IRC, the tongue seems a little looser, people often say what first comes to mind because there is no palpable reaction except text, which does not always sting as sharply as a facial gesture combied with a sharp reaction. This looseness makes for some interensting, raw conversation that was often entertaining and otherwise essential to my research. IRC was as important to my research as mailing lists and was perhaps the most important vehicle for making my presence in a routine sense, known. Over years and years of being on IRC, chatting in the wee hours of the morning, I became a more or less semi-permanent fixture. More than anywhere else, I became embedded the routine social life of the project via IRC, a place I have yet to leave and I doubt I will anytime soon.

He also raises the question of history and I have always given a lot of attention to how historical can and should we be. In my thinking, so much work on virtual communities strikes as a-historical, describing social organization without adddressing the local and perhaps more global event that were at the basis for organizing, change etc. History, even if is something we tend to think of as neatly in the past, I guess is always ongoing, in the sense that the history is always (in the) present, always in the making, even if it is only with time that we can actually see what what going on with more clarity.

I look forward to Joseph’s ongoing research on Wikipedia and I imagine the comparisons with F/OSS (which he is already mapping), will bring into stark relief that which is unique to F/OSS and what it may share with other collaborative, non-software communities.

I have been following Debian for years. For most of them, female presence has been uncomfortably sparse. But thanks to a recent effort ,led by some great ladies, to bring awareness to the existence of women and to encourage more to apply, there indeed has been an upsurge of developers and developers to be. Shows that some organization and visibility can go a far ways.