I am helping to kick off the Decoding Liberation Book Launch Party at the Brecht Forum in NYC. If you are in the area, and are into the politics of free software, do come along. Details also pasted below as their webpage is a little bit of an aesthetic jumble.

The Brecht Forum invites you to celebrate the release of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, published by Routledge in their New Media and Cyberculture Series.

October 3rd, 7:30 PM
451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets, New York, NY 10014.
(212) 242-4201
brechtforum@brechtforum.org

Suggested Donation: $6/$10/$15
Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers

Featuring commentary by Gabriella Coleman and discussions with the authors
and audience.

A reception will follow.

Commentator:

Gabriella Coleman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media,
Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is an
anthropologist who examines the role of the law and new media technologies
in extending liberal and anarchist values and sustaining new forms of political
activism. She received her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology at the
University of Chicago in 2005 and is completing a book manuscript Coding
Liberal Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source
Software.

Authors:

Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science
at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He earned a BA in
Mathematical Statistics from Delhi University (1984), an MS in Computer
Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (1990) and a PhD in
Philosophy from the City University of New York (2000). He has worked on
logics for belief revision and merging; his current research interests
include the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, the
legal theory of artificial agents, and the politics and ethics of
technology. His teaching responsibilities span the Departments of Computer
and Information Science and Philosophy. In his spare time, Samir is a
military historian, most recently co-authoring The India-Pakistan Air War
of 1965 (with PVS Jagan Mohan), published in 2005.

Scott Dexter is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science
at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He earned a BS in
Mathematics and Computer Science from Denison University (1993) and his MS
(1996) and PhD (1998) in Computer Science and Engineering from the
University of Michigan. His research interests include network and
multimedia security, distributed computing, computer science pedagogy, and
the history, politics, and economics of technology. He has been an
invited speaker at meetings in Philadelphia, Toronto, Prague, and the
People’s Republic of China, and is co-author of an introductory
programming textbook.