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@ssrc.org> To: <opensource@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@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