[wos] The Politics of Open Source Adoption

[Volker Grassmuck]

The Politics of Open Source Adoption
Read - Contribute - Win!
The Social Science Research Council invites you to collaborate on a
real-time history of the politics of open source software adoption.  We
are pleased to offer a first version of this account-POSA 1.0-in both
.pdf and wiki versions, at http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/POSA .  POSA 1.0
includes contributions from Gabriella Coleman, Kenneth Cukier, Shay
David, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Eugene Kim, Volker Grassmuck, Bildad Kagai,
Nicolas Kimolo, and Jennifer Urban, and is edited by Joe Karaganis
(SSRC) and Robert Latham (SSRC).   Our project begins with the
observation that accounts of the Free and/or Open Source Software
(F/OSS) movement, to date, have been oriented mostly by the improbable
fact of F/OSS's existence.  At this stage of F/OSS development and
advocacy, we want to ask a different set of questions-not how open
source works as a social and technical project, or whether open source
provides benefits in terms of cost, security, etc., but rather how open
source is becoming embedded in political arenas and policy debates.  For
our purposes, understanding the 'politics of adoption' means stepping
back from the task of explaining or justifying F/OSS in order to ask how
increasingly canonical explanations and justifications are mobilized in
different political contexts.  POSA 1.0 maps many of the different kinds
of political and institutional venues in which F/OSS adoption is at
stake. It tries to understand important institutional actors within
those venues, and the ways in which arguments for and against F/OSS are
framed and advanced. It seeks to clarify the different opportunities and
constraints facing F/OSS adoption in different sectors and parts of the
world.  It is an inevitably partial account that--we hope--can be
extended and deepened by other participants in these processes. We
invite your help in preparing POSA 2.0. To sweeten the pot, two prizes
of $250 will be awarded to the best new contributions to POSA 2.0 . This
project was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://coredump.buug.de/pipermail/wos/attachments/20050606/aa090b1b/untitled-2.html