[Fsfe-ie] The Politics of Open Source Adoption

[teresahackett at eircom.net]

Includes a description of "LiMux"-free software for Munich by Volker 
Grassmuck and the European politics of F/OSS by Rishab Ghosh.

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-------- Original Message -------

*From: * Joe Karaganis
*Sent: * Thursday, June 02, 2005 5:30 PM
*To: * Joe Karaganis
*Cc: * Taryn Drongowski
*Subject: * The Politics of Open Source Adoption

Just a note to:

(1) signal the launch of our report on "The Politics of Open Source
Adoption" (POSA 1.0);
(2) invite collaboration on a more comprehensive POSA 2.0 via our
project wiki.

Both are available at: _http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/POSA_

Help in circulating to interested parties would be most welcome.

Best wishes,

Joe Karaganis

Program Officer
Social Science Research Council

karaganis at 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—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 new
contributions to POSA 2.0 .
This project was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.