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Episode 9 (2020): R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard - “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communities

Episode 9 (2020): R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard - “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communi…

FromHacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast


Episode 9 (2020): R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard - “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communi…

FromHacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast

ratings:
Length:
20 minutes
Released:
Sep 2, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

R. Stuart Geiger calls himself an Ethnographer of computation and computational ethnographer, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication and the Haligiolu Data science Institute.Dorothy Howard is a Ph.D. student in Communication at UC San Diego, and her interests broadly span across the psychosocial and material effects of sociotechnical systems on society, and on worker's lives and subjectivities.In this session, Stuart and Dorothy will present findings about the work of maintaining community-based free and/or open-source software (F/OSS) projects, focusing on invisible and infrastructural work. Many F/OSS projects have become foundational across academia, industry, government, journalism, and activism. Although F/OSS projects provide immense benefits for society, they are often created and sustained by volunteer labor. Their maintainers often struggle with how to sustain and support their projects, particularly for projects lower down the stack like software libraries, operating systems, or kernels, which become adopted as infrastructure. Some growing projects transition into non-profit foundations, startups, or corporate patronage, while others stand against more traditional organizational models and align with more decentralized, cooperative, or ‘hacker’ cultures. 
Released:
Sep 2, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (16)

As Covid-19 turned most conferences virtual, so to combat Zoom-fatigue, at 4S/EASST 2020 we decided to try another format and turn a conference session into a podcast. Among hundreds of panels, papers and sessions, our panels rounded up all sorts of researchers who study what it is to be a hacker, and what hacking, programming, tinkering and working with computers is all about. The first series comes to you from the 2020 joint Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference (4S/EASST), titled "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds" which took place in "virtual Prague" from August 18th-21st. The second series comes to you from EASST 2022 titled "The Politics of Technoscientific Futures" and held in Madrid 2022-07-06 to 2022-07-09. Our panel was titled "Hacking Everything. The cultures and politics of hackers and software workers". The hosts are Paula Bialski, who is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Andreas Bischof who is a Research Group Leader at Chemnitz University of Technology, and Mace Ojala, a lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records. The theme track of first series is "Rocky" by Paula & Karol. Heights Beats produced the theme track of the second series. Funding for the editing of this first series comes from University of St. Gallen, the second from Chemnitz University of Technology.