[Air-l] [Fwd: The Politics of Open Source Adoption]

[Karim R. Lakhani]

Hi All,

This may be of interest to various folks!  Looks very interesting...

Karim

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	The Politics of Open Source Adoption
Date: 	Thu, 2 Jun 2005 12:00:57 -0400
From: 	Joe Karaganis <karaganis at ssrc.org>
To: 	<opensource at MIT.EDU>




Hello open source research group,

I want to point your attention to our new posted, online collaborative
report / wiki, and invite participation from your network.  Could you
circulate and/or post as appropriate?

Thanks!

Joe Karaganis

Program Officer
Social Science Research Council

karaganis at ssrc.org
(212) 377-2700, ext. 469
fax: (212) 377-2727




*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 (500KB
.pdf)--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
contributions to POSA 2.0



-- 
Karim R. Lakhani
MIT Sloan | The Boston Consulting Group
Mobile: +1 (617) 851-1224
http://spoudaiospaizen.net
http://web.mit.edu/lakhani/www | http://opensource.mit.edu