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 wrote it. It was interesting to see how my own [...]
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 Ubuntu, so naturally, my expectations were high. As Kelty argues, [...]
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 – a term coined by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, and [...]
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 on my own, analyze it and bring it together in [...]
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 PDF file. I’ve released it under a Creative Commons license [...]
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, though not without being told that there was a distinct [...]
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 to spare. Well, now I know. I got the letter [...]
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 becoming to closely involved with the field. It is taking [...]
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: I think Debian is a tremendously interesting case when it [...]
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 regards to Debian, but also with regards to the translation [...]