ox4 - Final Version

Free Software and Beyond
The World of Peer Production

Speakers
Athina Karatzogianni
Schedule
Day 2
Room Humanities Bridgeford Cordingley
Start time 16:00
Duration 01:30
Info
ID 32
Event type Lecture
Track Social movements
Language English

Confronting the difficulties of learning from the open source for contemporary social movements

Contemporary social movements have been extremely researched and theorised before. The open source and/or free software movement and its practical and ideological contribution to social and political change has also been the preoccupation of many current cutting edge research projects in many disciplines, in universities around the world. Nevertheless, the reasons, social movements, especially those still remaining in hierarchical modes and drawing from archaic practices, resist the lessons offered by the free software movement have not been explored enough yet. This paper seeks to discuss the residual resistance in certain social movements to the 'operational magic' of the open source, while at the same time discussing opportunistic and hurried co-optations of the FLOSS by both specific social movements and the virtual media elite. From this particular viewpoint, our understanding of media theory, social movement theory and social movements empirically would have to be refined to include revelations in both theory and practice offered abundantly by peer production communities.