Literature Review: Networks of (anti-)trust

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…

Infrastructural Nodes: (De-)Coding Community Meetups international

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…

A bright question mark in a dark room

Asking the right questions

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…

“Books of a feather” – IDE Literature Review

“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…

How to unveil the invisible: Human-Centered Design as qualitative approach

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…

view along a historic steel bridge

Walking the Walk

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…

What Open Digital Infrastructure Means to Us

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…