In relation to that, I had a bit of an epiphany in relation to this discussion and my own work. Kelty’s book shows just how Free Software is a practice, not a movement as such. Thus, it makes sense to study free software communities as communities of practice.

Now I realize that the above post is really an early attempt at synthesizing Kelty’s five core practices with the ideas of communities of practice.

I’ll have to spend some more time thinking about this, thanks!

It seems to me that Wenger’s definition of a community as “a history of social learning that is expressed as a social formation” fits very well with what you see in Ubuntu and Kelty’s five core practices. (And it’s very helpful to break those practices apart — can’t wait to finish reading your dissertation; Kelty’s book is next; too bad for the other books on the stack.

In “Digital Habitats” (the book we’re struggling to get out the door) we try to show how (from a practice, not anthropological, perspective) these kinds of practices show up in plain old ordinary communities of practice that use technology to “be together.” We came up with the term “technology steward” that’s all about adaptability and critique:

http://learningalliances.net/2006/12/definition-of-technology-steward/

All best,
Biella

thanks for commenting! I agree that the Ubuntu community remains true to the core practices of free software, as that community consciously seeks to maintain those practices in the Ubuntu system while experimenting with connecting these practices with other structures (like Canonical and Launchpad) to push Free Software in new directions.

As for the the remix: Thinking about it, it makes sense that all academic work to some extent is modulations of previous work. Reworking more than remixing. But I’m still fascinated with the potential for remixing texts to make certain ideas more lucid.

In this case, I probably won’t remix the text to make a whole new essay, but rather use your ideas along with my findings in a presentation – it’ll certainly help me to figure out how the details of your work fits with mine.

As for letting your book into my brain, it was already there to some extent before it was published, which you’ll find if you read my thesis’ bibliography.

Oh, and thanks for explaining the title – I didn’t get monetary reference, and this helped as well. But it still doesn’t work for me.

As far as modulating, I think you’ve already done it, in part. As academics, we tend to modulate in a much more abstract way, but understanding and manipulating concepts in order to produce new texts. Academic practice is intimately tied up with an agonistic form of reworking that is much less materially about re-mixing than software or music. Which is not to say that you can’t change the title. By all means. I chose it because it has the dual reference to money (25 cents in colloquial american) and information. That works for some people, not for others.

Thanks again for letting my book into your brain.
ck