[Air-L] CFP 4S/ESOCITE - Open Panel 63. Peer production and open collaboration

[maxigas]

Dear researchers,

We invite you to submit an abstract to our session on the relevance of peer production, open collaboration and hacking to Science and Technology Studies.

The panel is organised for the 4S/ESOCITE conference in Buenos Aires, 20-23 August 2014.

You are welcome to get in touch with us to discuss abstracts informally.

Deadline: March 3 2014

Conference website: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting

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63. Peer production and open collaboration: Revisiting closure,
stabilisation and black boxing through unfinished artefacts

maxigas and Eduard Aibar

This panel seeks to bring together scholars studying peer
production processes through STS lenses and concepts. Peer
production is a form of network-based voluntary cooperation
aimed at contributing to a commons, epitomised by the Linux
kernel and Wikipedia and more recently applied to hardware. Case
studies of peer production projects can inspire new theoretical
developments within STS and simultaneously engender insights on
emerging socio-technical ensembles.

Peer producers work a lot to fend off stabilisation, building
functional parts (like loose couplings and Application
Programming Interfaces) into technologies and organisations
which serve to prevent closure. While these mechanisms for
openness do stabilise, the resulting technologies are not
exactly black boxes whose functional composition is rendered
inaccessible to gaze, discourse and engineering. They can be
understood as “unfinished artefacts”.

Moreover, shared machine workshops manifest a model which goes
against the received wisdom of trade-offs between “professional”
expertise and radically open “amateur” contributions. Such open
organisational architectures blend in three functions
traditionally separate in modern institutions: education,
research and production. In this context citizen participation
in technological issues is mainly achieved by practical
interventions into research and development.

We call for contributors who explore peer production specific
projects from a wide range of STS perspectives. One is how
stabilisation, closure and black boxing are themselves socially
constructed, deconstructed and reconfigured in this arena.
Another is the broader structural implications of peer
production, since it is usually read as an emerging mode of
production with disruptive consequences. Finally, since peer
production is increasingly used in a wide range of settings
(software development, knowledge production, infrastructure
building or farming), the way it is re-enacted and appropriated
by new actors can also be of interest to scholars with various theoretical backgrounds.

Languages: English and Spanish

http://www.4sonline.org/open_sessions

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maxigas, kiberpunk
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http://research.metatron.ai/

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