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…
“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…
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…
As we set out to formulate our research hypothesis, one central question remained contested: What does open digital infrastructure actually mean? Interpretations vary from information technology standards or their implementations to tools and services that enable developers to do their work. For us, neither on their own seemed promising: Mere standards as laid down by…
When we got the great news that the Ford Foundation had accepted our research proposal and we saw all the great projects that are in our cohort, it was time to look back to how it began. Julia had co-founded the Prototype Fund, a funding program for freelance software developers based in Germany, in 2016….