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Articles Conference Reviews |
200715VieSession 1.5: Economics, Code Writers, and Labor Politics
Stan Harrison (University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth), Michael Pennell (University of Rhode Island), Annette Vee (University of Wisconsin at Madison) and Nathan McKenzie, Independent Consultant Stan Harrison, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth: "Allegory at the Juncture of the Urban, Technology, and Space" Harrison jumped off the idea of the bleeding edge discussed in the first town hall session that morning. An avowed anti-humanist, Harrison argued that we are only bleeding edge if we are at the bleeding edge of theory. Students shouldn’t be so concerned with identity or the rhetorical situation; rather, using Marxist theory (specifically chapter one of volume one of Das Kapital), we should look at identity in its larger context. Beginning with the Internet as an example, Harrison described how the Net was privatized in 1995 and “we see the machines then differently” because state funding was used for privatization; thus the machines and the identities they help create are produced by capital. The Net creates a privatized social space where we connect to each other, one point at a time, and we pay for the privilege—thus we become capital online. “My identity, then, is a commodity,” noted Harrison, “and I pay for the privilege to be me.” Within each individual are crystallized units of value—so then what are we? We are allegories, said Harrison, and contain words that have other meanings. What do we then do? We ask students to read John Donne, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and write allegories to “trace a world that produces them.” Michael Pennell, University of Rhode Island: "The Attention Economy and Local Digital Writing" Pennell’s talk focused on his experiences teaching a class in 2003 that attempted to tap in to the attention economy by asking students to edit pages local to Rhode Island on the WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page) site. Following Lankshear and Knobel’s assertion that we must move beyond the typical classroom writing and instead find an affiliation with larger audiences, Pennell asked his students to participate in local digital writing that would then be read by a larger audience. As Wikipedia was vast and many of the students enrolled in his class were unfamiliar with wikis, Pennell chose WikiTravel because it was more manageable. As well, the local entries on Rhode Island features of interest were thin and thus students could work to create more substantial entries based on their own knowledge of the area. Students were divided into groups based on interest and made decisions on what to include, what to change, etc. while also maintaining the WikiTravel default template and using the site’s style guide. Students’ attention was there; the larger audience’s attention was there as well—often outside readers made changes to the pages and students had to react to the changes. Pennell ended by noting that some students perhaps paid too much attention to the project at times, worrying constantly about whether their page would be changed or not. I believe this is an interesting side effect of collaborative writing and one that many students, raised in the tradition of single-authored work, often have difficulty negotiating at first. Annette Vee, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Nathan McKenzie, Independent Consultant: "Code Writers Writing Back: The Open Source Community Evolves to Confront Corporate Legal Challenges" Vee, an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teamed up with McKenzie, an independent technology consultant, to discuss legal issues within the open source community. While GPL licenses have made free code proprietary, open source code writers have faced attacks against their code. For example, JMRI, a model train software company’s tiny open source project, was attacked by a lawsuit from Matthew Katzer of KAM (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060514233436196). JMRI, founded by Bob Jacobsen, has a forum with 18 active members hosted by Sourceforge as well as a Yahoo usergroup. In these two sites, Vee and McKenzie were able to find traces of the claim and its impact on JMRI. For example, JMRI described avoiding talking to KAM over listservs (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jmriusers/message/7892) and Jacobsen opened the dispute up to the public (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jmriusers/message/20985). In contrast, KAM closes the discussion; there is no discussion of the dispute on KAM’s site, trainpriority.com. The communication, state the speakers, mirrors their code: KAM’s words are only available through the court while JMRI’s discussion is publicly available and has even been Slashdotted twice (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/13/238201). It’s a “David versus Goliath” story and one that we should pay attention to as open source becomes more prevalent in academia.
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