Apologies for cross-postings

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Dynamics in the FLOSS social world
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Call for Papers for a session on FLOSS at the biennial conference of the
European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) to
be held in Lausanne (Switzerland) from 23rd to 26th August, 2006

This session aims to contribute to the understanding of the
heterogeneity, multiplicity and local enactments in the free/libre open
source software (FLOSS) development by encouraging more contextualised
and qualitative research. We encourage interested scholars to go beyond
cognitive questions on mitivations (e.g. why FLOSS developers
contribute) to explore fresh and challenging research questions emerging
from the heterogeneous and dynamic FLOSS social world. Our aim is to
bring the diversity and contingencies of this field to the front stage,
including issuses of shifting identities and contested identities (such
as shifts between users and developers and gendered politics). This is
not to deny that there are also integrating technologies and practices
at work, bringing people and code together in FLOSS projects. We thus
invite interested scholars to explore both the sentrifugal and
centripetal forces of FLOSS projects.

More specifically we encourage contributions on the following issues:

1)Discussions and analyses of the interdependency between FLOSS
artefacts and actors (users/developers) in a specific context;

2)Accounts of change of the FLOSS projects (e.g. institutionalisation,
disappearance);

3)Various ways in which FLOSS-development enact local politics;

4)Relationships between developers and users (working on-line and
off-line);

5)How different cultural differences between actors influence the FLOSS
development?

6)Multiple roles and Identities (blurring boundaries between developers
and users)

7)Gender issues;

8)FLOSS development practices and processes;

9)Managing and coordinating diversity in FLOSS projects (e.g.
leadership, authorities)

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Deadlines

The session organising committee invites abstracts (up to 300 words) on
any of the issues raised above. Abstracts should be sent via e-mail to
Yuwei Lin (yuwei{at}ylin.org) and Lars Risan (lars.risan{at}tik.uio.no)
by 15 January 2006. Decisions on these will be communicated to
authors by the 1st of March 2006. Guidelines for preparing and
presenting papers are available at
http://www2.unil.ch/easst2006/guidelines.htm. For more information about
EASST 2006 conference please visit
http://www2.unil.ch/easst2006/callpapers.htm.

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Yuwei Lin | yuwei at ylin dot org
http://www.ylin.org