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 MoreOnline Ethnography
There was an interesting attempt at a discussion on the Anthrodesign mailing list recently as to what online ethnography actually entails. But the discussion never really seemed to get off the ground, and effectively had died by the time I posted my comment. So 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 MoreOnline 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. …
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 MoreBruce 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 …
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 …
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