A couple of weeks ago, I presented part of my thesis at the Danish open source conference Open Source Days. In the process of preparing the presentation, I returned to thesis and delved into the material in a way that I haven’t done since I …
Read MoreBit by bit – a review of “Two Bits”
I finally found the time to read Christopher Kelty’s book Two Bits – The cultural Significance of Free Software. Kelty is one of the few other anthropologists studying Free Software in general, and his work has been a huge inspiration in my thesis work on …
Read MoreThe Community of Practice on Communities of Practice
Some time ago, I was invited by John D Smith to present my thesis work on Ubuntu as a Community of Practice at the CP Square autumn dissertation fest. CP Square is an online community of researchers and consultants working with Communities of Practice – …
Read MoreHow to write a thesis
Writing a thesis is a difficult undertaking. Before I started writing mine, I hadn’t written any assignment longer than 30 pages (my Bachelor’s essay), and it was quite a step up from that to having to structure a huge complex of data that I’d gathered …
Read MoreThe thesis is now available
It’s been a long way underway, first through fieldwork, writing, submitting, defending, editing, and polishing. But now, finally. My anthropological thesis on the social dynamics of the Ubuntu community is available for everybody to read. You can download the abstract, or the full 2.9 MB …
Read More… graduates!
And thus arose the day where I end my association with the University of Copenhagen after almost 7 years to the day. I defended my thesis this morning with some success, with fun props and pictures to explain my theoretical perspective. And I passed comfortably, …
Read MoreThesis defense
Since coming back from my holidays, I have been in something of a limbo state while waiting to find out the date for my thesis defense. I couldn’t quite tell if I should be panicky with last-minute preparations or summerly relaxed with plenty of time …
Read MoreThesis done!
My thesis, based on my anthropological fieldwork in the Ubuntu community, is finally done, and I turned it in yesterday. Since I began writing my thesis, I’ve had this as my background screen on my computer: ‘Going Native‘ is losing your reflexive anthropological distance by …
Read MoreDebian as the research library of Free Software
I’ve had a quite interesting discussion with Lars Risan in the comments to my recent blog post on Launchpad about Lars’ paper on the role of technical infrastructure in Free Software development, and I think Lars does well to describe the central tension within these: …
Read MoreWhy Launchpad isn’t taking off just yet
Lars Risan, a Norwegian anthropologist leading a group of researchers at the university of Oslo studying “The Political Economy of Free/Open Software” recently put up an interesting blog post about the Launchpad technical infrastructure’s effects on the relationship between Ubuntu and various upstreams, both with …
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