Thanks to the efforts of Bryan Pfaffenberger (thanks Bryan!), there is now an STS wiki. Here is a note from Bryan:

I’m writing to announce (somewhat earlier than I had planned) the STS
Wiki, located at http://www.stswiki.org . I had hoped to build lots of
content before getting the word out — but the word’s out anyway
(thanks, Google). In the last 24 hours the content has been expanded by
something like 200%. The rocket, it seems, has left the pad. So take a
look – and:

(1) add yourself to the worldwide directory of sts scholars;
(2) add your program to the worldwide directory of sts programs;
(3) upload a bibliography
(4) help build the link directory
(5) think of more ways to use the site!
(6) keep an eye out for vandalism
(7) forward this message to other STS scholars

If you know how to use Wikipedia, you know how to use STS Wiki. It uses
the same software. Do please visit and contribute regularly.

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.

I have started to blog again on DGI. It may soon be the only place where I blog and I imagine less frequently than before. And even if I keep this one, it will soon be moving into a new house, so I will post the address once and if the move is made.

Flying across the country during a nearly nation-wide cloudless day is nothing but striking. The first coast, for me being the east coast, is packed with human presence, nestled in green and this past weekend, was drenched in water. Then much of the country in the middle is sparse and the dramatic landscapes—the jutting Rockies covered in white, the hollow but topographically reddish-brownish Grand Canyon—makes them selves heard, and loudly. By the time you reach the other coast (if you fly into Los Angeles, like I did at least), human signs are in full swing again, notably in the form of concrete. Flying into LAX has its own peculiarities. If one did not know that wafting brown translucent film was pollution, one might think it was some natural and pleasant outgrowth of the brown hills that edge the city.

I left CA 2.5 years ago and went for my first visit this past weekend. I went to give a talk at the BioArt and Public Sphere Conference at UC Irvine. First I stopped in LA for a weekend of family fun since I had not seen my brother and his children in way too many years.

In the last year I have been on a self-imposed conference hiatus. Being they entail signigicant prep work, travel, and once there a lot of attention, they can act as a string of interruptions that last year I could not afford as I had to finish my dissertation. But now, I am back on the conference circuit, in part to present finished work and in part to present emergent, embryonic work in need of some serious shaping up.

So I felt particularly lucky to be invited to speak on my new project on psychiatric survivors as it really forced me, in the last weeks, to jump in to a whole set of new materials. The project went from a formless entity, residing primarily in the deep and inaccessible (even to me) recesses of my brain, into a formed substance that will hopefully, over time, become something more substantial.

The conference was one organized around one my favorite formats: an intimate one day affair and I would say incredibly unique in its inter-disciplinary nature. Ok, so most conferences fancy themselves interdisciplinary and, to some degree, they are: in attendance are sociologists, anthropologists, historians, crit lit folks and so on but we tend to reside in more or less the same galaxy, located perhaps on different planets. At this conference, being there were artists, engineers, biologists, activists, and the social sciency types, interdisciplinary functioned more along the lines of inter-galactic. It is not always an easy conversation to have because the distances between galaxies are much longer than between planets, but, lets face it: inter-galactice travel is a blast.

If you are interested in any of the talks, I think that the organizers are soon going to put up an archive of photos, video, and audio.

There were too many fascinating and important topics raised to discuss but here are some of the projects/talks that I found particularly interesting because I perhaps knew nothing about them until this weekend. First, if you don’t know about SymbioticA, well then learn a little about them as this project/lab/concept is probably one of the only fixed places with significant resources (as in a lab) where the intersection between bio-science and art is being created and sustained. Before this conference, there was another week long event BioTech Art Workshop Conducted by Symbiotica

One of the conference goals was to examone how to create a more participatory sphere between experts and non-experts in science via the avenue of art. Claire Pentecost, an artist based out of Chicago, raised this question pointedly. She explored the structural similarities between science and art in relation to the public (they are somewhat esoteric, inaccessible, etc) to problematize the idea that art is easily equipped to act a bridge that gets us toward greater accessibility. In other words, it is not just science that is esoteric, often, so is art. Along with raising that very difficult question that should be asked if such a bridge can ever be crossed, she also presented with the most vivaciousness and flair, which is I so appreciate since we sit for a full day of listening.

Sujatha Byravan also talked about The Council for Responsible Genetics, which has done some amazing work in its 20 + year existence. I was very happy to find out about their work and think that as bio-genetics and similar fields have a routine but perhaps unseen impact on our lives, their work becomes even more important.

Finally, Rachel Mayeri, a video artist and professor at Harvey Mudd, showed her video Stories from the Genome. Here is an excerpt from her website about it:

Part cloning experiment, part documentary, Stories from the Genome follows an unnamed CEO-geneticist whose company sequenced the Human Genome in 2003 – a genome that secretly was his own. Not satisfied with this feat, the scientist self-replicates, producing a colony of clone-scientists to save himself from Alzheimer’s. The animated video switches between misadventures in cloning, and a history of equally improbable theories of human development.

Stories from the Genome is based on the true life story of Craig Venter, who was the CEO of Celera Genomics in a race with an international consortium of scientists to decode the human genome. He did in fact use his own genetic material for the Human Genome Project, completed in 2001, despite much fanfare about the “diversity” of human populations it would represent. The video is intended to comment upon the dangers of short-sighted, self-interest in contemporary biotechnology and its appropriation for profit of human genetic information.

The video was stunning, in part because it was, peraps in some respects, an answer to the question that Claire raised. This video was not so esoteric, but incredibly accessible, however, not because it was simple or simplified the issue. It was accessible because it was a fun and funny interestinng story that could captivate, and thus take you along a short ride to explore the complicated issues and implications of genetic technologies. Combining weirdness, wonder, and humor, with a great dose of special effects, this video is well worth watching if you can get your hands on a copy.

Well I have pretty much moved and am settling into life in New Jersey. Lately, I find myself at my computer for it is the ritual time of grant/job applications. On the one hand, like any application-process, it can be incredibly frustrating and drab. Nothing like having to encode yourself on paper, over and over again.

On the other, it gives academics as chance to revisit aspirations, and make them more tangible by putting them into a string of words that must capture the interest of a range of academics. Thus, we only lightly butter our proposals in jargon, making them a little more accessible than our other work. Without all that heavy grease of disciplinary jargon, it helps me learn what I really want to do and I find this quite enlivening.

That said, I am working on proposing an entirely new project, one that examines the politics of such anti-psychiatry groups like mindfreedom. Unlike proposing work on free software, I struggle to find the right words and phrases for, in reality, there is still so much that lies beyond my comprehension. In the case of F/OSS, most of the knowledge is contained in my brain, thanks to years and years of writing and thinking of the subject. I find myself a child again, confronted with having to learn vast new amount of information so that I can begin to make larger sense of the meaning enfolded within this world of politics, suffering, and the law. With a new project comes some freshness and excitement that I may have lost and some frustration at stumbling over lack of ethnographic knowledge, which makes the writing process much easier.

Given these time constraints of job applications, conference papers, and readings for my postdoc, I have had to make some serious choices about what constitutes extracurricular reading and the winner this year is The Economist.

Those who know my political sensibilities probably find my desire to read the voluminous Economist, every week, suspect. But I actually like reading the periodical for many reasons. Foremost, I learn a lot about the world when reading their articles. They don’t assume you know anything about the subject at hand and give you enough background information so you can follow the article intelligibly. They never skimp of providing some good numbers, a decent political analysis, and wide breadth of subject matter. Second I simply love the clarity of writing. In fact, I think their style is a wonderful basic template for grant/application writing because it is so clear and crisp. They also cover news from all over the world, including protests that supposed liberal newspapers like the NYTimes will rarely cover. And finally they rarely mask their free market/conservative politics (making it easy to seperate the chaff from the kernel of news I want to learn about, for example by saying things like:
“No country but America explores such a wide range of subjects (including some dubious ones such as GBLT—gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies)).

Who knows maybe a year of reading The Economist will transform me into a stodgy British conservative type with lackluster Victorian sensibilities . I hope not but if I do, I hope, if nothing else, their good writing does rub off on me too.

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…

One of the interesting elements about software projects like debian is that developers often take the step of researching the sociological and organizational dynamics of their project. This paper, in particular, titled Evolution of Volunteer Participation in Libre Software Projects, examines how the nature of volunterism as well as length of committment in Debian affects the technical upkeep the project. It has a lot of great quantitative data and some good insight on the nature of volunteer committment on Debian.

I know one of the paper’s authors, Martin Michlmayr , is a Debian developer and as his website states, his doctoral work is in quality management in free software projects. Then there is Martin Krafft also a PhD student who recently (actually after a Debian developer con) decided to switch his doctoral topic to study, in the hopes of improving, the workflow of Debian devlopment. He has already published a book on Debian and imagine his research, soon to begin, will produce more material for more books and more articles.

So, again, what is notable about many of these projects is precisely the self-reflexive interest in them as a site of academic study and managed improvement. This is not unlike the recursivity that Chris Kelty discusses in his Recursive Publics piece, although instead of tweaking technolgy, they are tweaking social organization and technological methodologies in order to better tweak the tech.

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.

Today I got this email:

Dear Ms. Coleman,

We have received final copies of your dissertation entitled The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition which you are submitting to fulfill the requirements for the Ph.D. in the area of Anthropology.

Our staff has reviewed your dissertation and the revisions you recently submitted. Your dissertation is now complete. Congratulations on completing the University-wide formatting requirements!

Phew. Even though I defended a couple months ago, this means I will graduate in less than a week. The dissertation formatting brought me great distress, to say the least. For example, earlier in the week since I had not heard from the office, and I knew that graduation was looming, my fears were playing out, as they usually do, in my dreams. This week’s winner was one in which I had razor sharp wooden spikes in my feet, about 15 in each one, that had to be pulled by a doctor with no anaesthesia. It was pleasant and I knew it was one grotesque metaphor of what it would feel like if I had not made the deadline for summer graduation because of some formatting mishap.

So, today I also wrote this email to the Debian project, giving them a little background on the nature of dissertations and pointing them to my chapter on ethical enculturation on Debian.