February 2014 - JoPP-Public - lists.ourproject.org

Peer production and open collaboration: Revisiting closure, stabilisation and black boxing through unfinished artefacts
by Johan Söderberg 13 Feb '14

13 Feb '14

We invite you to submit an abstract to our session on the relevance of peer production, open collaboration and hacking to Science and Technology Studies. The panel is organised for the 4S/ESOCITE conference in Buenos Aires, 20-23 August 2014. You are welcome to get in touch with us to discuss abstracts informally. Deadline: March 3 2014 Conference website: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting ---- Peer production and open collaboration: Revisiting closure, stabilisation and black boxing through unfinished artefacts maxigas and Eduard Aibar This panel seeks to bring together scholars studying peer production processes through STS lenses and concepts. Peer production is a form of network-based voluntary cooperation aimed at contributing to a commons, epitomised by the Linux kernel and Wikipedia and more recently applied to hardware. Case studies of peer production projects can inspire new theoretical developments within STS and simultaneously engender insights on emerging socio-technical ensembles. Peer producers work a lot to fend off stabilisation, building functional parts (like loose couplings and Application Programming Interfaces) into technologies and organisations which serve to prevent closure. While these mechanisms for openness do stabilise, the resulting technologies are not exactly black boxes whose functional composition is rendered inaccessible to gaze, discourse and engineering. They can be understood as “unfinished artefacts”. Moreover, shared machine workshops manifest a model which goes against the received wisdom of trade-offs between “professional” expertise and radically open “amateur” contributions. Such open organisational architectures blend in three functions traditionally separate in modern institutions: education, research and production. In this context citizen participation in technological issues is mainly achieved by practical interventions into research and development. We call for contributors who explore peer production specific projects from a wide range of STS perspectives. One is how stabilisation, closure and black boxing are themselves socially constructed, deconstructed and reconfigured in this arena. Another is the broader structural implications of peer production, since it is usually read as an emerging mode of production with disruptive consequences. Finally, since peer production is increasingly used in a wide range of settings (software development, knowledge production, infrastructure building or farming), the way it is re-enacted and appropriated by new actors can also be of interest to scholars with various theoretical backgrounds. Languages: English and Spanish http://www.4sonline.org/open_sessions

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5th ERQ Conference - Call for abstracts: It’s a free work… When work relations become passionate
by maurizio teli 07 Feb '14

07 Feb '14

Maybe of interest for some of you Apologies for Cross-Posting --- Dear colleague, we are pleased to send you the call for abstracts of the session///*It*//*’s a free work… When work relations become passionate.*/ Your contribution to the proposed session will be greatly appreciated! We take this occasion to remind you that the keynote speakers for the V Etnography and Qualitative Research Conference are *Michael Burawoy*, University of California Berkeley, and *Marc Abélès*, LAIOS – Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Institutions et des Organisations Sociales. On the conference website and below you can find the text of the call for abstracts. Proposals should be sent by*_Februay 17, 2014_ *to: annalisa.murgia(a)unitn.it <mailto:[email protected]> maurizio(a)ahref.eu <mailto:[email protected]> Please, also CC the conference address: workshop.etnografia(a)unibg.it <mailto:[email protected]> Each proposal, of a maximum length of 1000 words, should contain: • the title of your talk; • your contact details (full name, email address, post address and affiliation) and those of your co-author/s, if any. Contributions will be accepted both in*Italian* and *English*. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by March 17, 2014. Contributors must register by April 21, 2014 to be included in the program. With best wishes, Annalisa Murgia & Maurizio Teli — Call for abstracts V Ethnography and Qualitative Research Conference. Bergamo, Italy 5-7 June 2014 website: http://www.etnografiaricercaqualitativa.it/?p=13 * * *It’s a free work… When working relations become passionate* Convenors:/ Annalisa Murgia/ (Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento) & /Maurizio Teli/ (Fondazione <ahref, Trento) In contemporary knowledge society, both creativity and the ability to put into play personal resources are recognized as precious and valuable competences. With this workshop, we want to stimulate a reflection within the debate on free work (Beverungen et al. 2013; Chicchi et al. 2013), starting with the ambivalent meaning of the word free, referring both to the absence of a price and to the domain of freedom. We invite to elaborate on the double face of contemporary work: on one side, it is characterized by low or absent wages, it is so intrusive to become totalizing; on the other side, it is often based on informal registers, on subjects’ desire for freedom, and on the confusion between free time and working time. Drawing upon the contribution on free software development by the anthropologist Christopher Kelty (2008), we can frame this social phenomenon as the expansion of voluntary activities that intertwine with work activities in many forms. What is common among software developers – and among others who describe their work primarily as a passion – is not only the individual expression of creativity, but also the translation of the playful-affective dimension in recursive processes of relation, processes that bring to a preoccupation for the institutional, technological, political and economical conditions which the particular community and its productive activities are based on. These are, therefore, working experiences (paid or unpaid) in which the subjects’ identification and self-expression are conveyed both by putting life itself at work (Morini e Fumagalli 2010; Fleming 2012) and by questioning the social relations within which work is realised (Borghi et al. 2011). The proposed subject of analysis is as wide as heterogeneous, and it includes knowledge work, the creative industries and high tech production chains, emotional and caring work, all sharing the ambivalences of free work. What are the characteristics of the activities wherein subjects invest their affections and desires and that become incorporated by the rhetoric of work as a mission? If, on one side, free work makes economically valuable free expert activities, can it allow the emergence of new forms of collective action? How can we understand the main traits of such phenomenon, in particular from a methodological perspective?

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Value and currency table of contents page created
by Mathieu ONeil 03 Feb '14

03 Feb '14

Hi Nate and Francesca I have modified the issues page so that the link from issue 4 now leads to a table of contents ?(TOC) page for your upcoming issue. http://peerproduction.net/issues/ This TOC page is private at this point so you will need to be logged in to Wordpress to populate it. (@Nate: you can create an account for Francesca in the "Users" section of the site if necessary.) The TOC page features some examples of headers and links which you can use as a guide for the creation of your issue. As mentioned previously, there is now an advice page which provides a number of "tips for uploading content". http://peerproduction.net/about/advice/ If you have any other questions do let us know. I look forward to reading your content. All best, Mathieu

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