Implicit development environments in FOSS infrastructure communities and the future of public good(s) by private means Open source has become a well-developed field of research, with many contributions into the concept itself, in terms of performance indicators, from a legal and regulatory point of view, the development of production processes, distribution mechanisms, and even how…
Early on in the course of the IDE project, interviews and literature review were pointing to the insight that meeting in person at work meetings and conferences is of great importance for tying nodes in the distributed system of trust in infrastructure communities. Although the Internet enabled decentralized cooperation beyond borders and provided the tools…
In our interviews we came across aspects and stories that didn’t make it into the report, but that we still find worth telling.
In our interviews, people who work on infrastructure projects also recommended very concrete measures how funding could better suit their needs. Here is an overview on ideas that go beyond funding for projects or products.
We gathered our insights in the report Roadwork ahead: Evaluating the needs of FOSS communities working on digital infrastructure in the public interest.
As I learned at the MirageOS retreat, good community work is about three things: Giving people time and space to deepen social ties, but in a way that suits them individually; daring to let go of structure and become all about participation in order to build up energy and motivation for the time between the retreats; and providing really, really good food.
Human-centered research equals the “active consultation of people” (Hanington 2010) and as a method is viable to approach a broader subject in order to map it out. For IDE, this means conducting lots and lots of interviews with people who work on open infrastructure projects. But we don’t pretend to know which questions are the…
“The hardest problems in computer science are people-problems” paraphrases a quote i recently picked up on Twitter. Coming from an STS background, i´d be so bold to add: some of the most interesting as well. It might not come too surprising that our research project specifically designed to investigate the implicit development environments of F/OSS…
In our initial grant proposal we stated that investigating the Implicit Development Environments (IDE) of technology is of special interest for the outcome of our research. Technological processes and forms of organisation are commonplace: Not only since the rise of workplace anthropology it is widely assumed, that languages, (social) rituals, and even material environments like…
What it takes to base a research project on Open Digital Infrastructure We do not only conduct research about Open Digital Infrastructure. Of course that is our main focus, but we set ourselves a side goal: To do credible work, we decided to rely on Open Source applications wherever possible. This is not just an…