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 [...]
I met with thesis advisor (or supervisor – I’m not really sure about the proper English terminology here. I think advisor sounds more precise) yesterday to discuss the outline of my thesis. As I had figured, he agreed that it was a good idea to design each chapter as independent essays with their own argument [...]
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 [...]
Now that I’ve officially finished my fieldwork, and with all the talk going on about Open Access Anthropology, I thought I’d try my own little Open Access experiment. I’ve decided to publish the question guide I’ve used for my fieldwork under the GPL. I’ve even indented and commented them in proper code fashion (or, at [...]
When I tell people that I do fieldwork among Free Software developers, I often try to relate it to more traditional anthropological ventures as a way to make it clearer to people what it is I do. Traditionally, anthropologists travelled to the part of the world that used to be colonized and lived among the [...]
Mark Shuttleworth’s recent post on the new gaudy desktop prettiness of Ubuntu has received a good deal of interest and discussion (more than 130 comments and counting). Pretty much all of that discussion was summed up in one of those comments: # Murray Cumming Says: October 25th, 2006 at 7:31 pm The bikeshed is brown. [...]
Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most ‘fluent’ in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the ‘grammar’ of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists. – Kate [...]
So with the release of the new version of Ubuntu, 6.10 (6 for 2006, 10 for October) I decided that rather than merely upgrading my system from 6.06 to 6.10, I would wipe clean my hard disk, wipe all my desktop settings and try to start afresh to see how long it would take me [...]