Joe Karaganis
Program Officer
Social Science Research Council
karaganis 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.