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 ideas [...]
Posts under ‘Ubuntu’
Presenting my thesis (again)
Bit 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 Ubuntu, so naturally, my expectations were high.
As Kelty argues, we’ve [...]
The 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 – a term coined by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, and [...]
Online communities work like parties
Recently, I’ve come across several blog posts using the metaphor of a good party to describe well-functioning online communities. Paraphrasing Matt Mullenweg, founder of the Wordpress project, Service Untitled sums up the metaphor thus:
Parties that are successful bring the right number of people together. Those people end up having a good time and having fun. [...]
The 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 PDF file.
I’ve released it under a Creative Commons license so [...]
Bruce Perens Live
“Free Software and Open Source are the same. What difference there used to be between the two is now deprecated. When we first began working on the term ‘Open Source’, Eric Raymond was afraid that IT companies couldn’t deal with Richard Stallman, and thus it would be necessary to distance ‘Open Source’ from Richard and [...]
Thesis 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 becoming to closely involved with the field. It is taking on some [...]
Debian 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:
I think Debian is a tremendously interesting case when it [...]
Why 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 regards to Debian, but also with regards to the translation [...]
Leaving Ubuntu – for a while
My thesis advisor is really a quite clever guy. I had a meeting with him this afternoon to discuss the first draft of my fieldwork report that I gave him a couple of days ago, and he really pulled it apart:
“Where’s the anthropological distance? Where’s the methodological reflections?” he demanded, and I must have looked [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
