Dissertation Research: Open Source Advocacy in Peru: Open Technologies, Economic Development and Political Reform in the Digital Age

这篇论文《科学社会研究中的改进授予》考察了发展中国家围绕自由/自由/自由和开放源码软件(FLOSS)倡导的矛盾的希望、愿望和承诺。在许多发展中国家，FLOSS是围绕信息技术和经济发展的政策中日益增长的特征，已经成为一个关键的地点，在这里，围绕经济现代化、政治责任、法律财产和自由公民身份的意义的竞争正在进行谈判。牙线在世界各地的快速增长涉及全球性和地方性力量的汇合，涉及来自政府、私营部门、公民社会和公民团体领域的不同行为者。NSF基金将支持秘鲁牙线倡导网络的人种学研究，该研究将收集口述历史与密集的档案工作和参与观察各种社会团体相结合，这些社会团体将自己定位为秘鲁的牙线倡导者，包括政府代表、非政府组织工作人员以及当地和国际牙线使用者网络的成员。该项目考察了FLOSS如何组织这些参与者之间的关系以及这些参与者的不同专业知识，以及作为FLOSS倡导者活动的结果，这些群体之间出现了哪些新的关系。此外，它还将分析采用哪些战略来招募政治和技术盟友，以及这些知识交流的做法如何建立对国家发展政策的新理解。该项目的主题是，在倡导自由软件技术的过程中，这些由FLOSS程序员、用户、公民社会团体、政府行为者和商业代表组成的不同网络同时促进了对政府、公民身份和全球信息社会中信息技术使用的多种相互竞争的理解。从这个意义上说，新千年的牙线可以被解读为一个关键的地方，在这里，经济现代化、政治责任、法律财产和自由公民的概念正在重新形成。这项研究将对新兴信息技术在发展中国家的使用和影响产生新的关注，将在几个研究领域做出有价值的贡献。首先，它将为法律研究带来新的理论见解，法律研究审查了经济发展计划，包括新的电子发展计划，如何将物质和非物质财产重新架构为新的、有价值的发展资源。其次，它将有助于技术社会研究中的新辩论，在这些研究中，关于知识网络和技术生产过程的研究已经发展起来。最后，它将扩大目前社会运动研究领域的研究，这些研究既调查了采用网络信息技术作为组织工具，也调查了网络作为集体行为者的新组织形式。

This Dissertation Improvement Grant in the Social Studies of Science examines the ambivalent hopes, desires, and promises that surround Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) advocacy in the developing world. A growing feature in the policies surrounding information technology and economic development in many developing nations, FLOSS has become a crucial site where contests over the meaning of economic modernization, political responsibility, legal property, and liberal citizenship are being negotiated. The rapid growth of FLOSS around the world involves a confluence of forces that are both global and local in dimension, involving diverse actors from the realms of government, the private sector, civil society, and citizen groups. NSF funds will support an ethnographic study of the FLOSS advocacy networks in Peru, which combines the collection of oral histories with intensive archival work and participant observation of various social groups who position themselves around FLOSS as advocates in Peru, including government representatives, NGO workers, and members of local and international networks of FLOSS users. The project examines how FLOSS organizes the relationships between and diverse expertises of these actors, and what new relationships come to emerge between these groups as a result of their activity as FLOSS advocates. In addition, it will analyze what strategies are employed to enroll political and technical allies, and how these practices of knowledge exchange build new understandings of national development policies. The project's thesis is that in advocating for free software technologies, these diverse networks of FLOSS programmers, users, civil society groups, government actors, and business representatives simultaneously advance multiple, competing understandings of government, citizenship and the uses of information technologies within global information societies. In this sense, FLOSS in the new millennium can be read as a crucial site where notions of economic modernization, political responsibility, legal property, and liberal citizenship are being reformulated. Drawing a new focus on the uses and impacts of emergent information technologies inthe developing world, this research will make valuable contributions to several fields of study. Firstly, it will yield new theoretical insights into legal studies, which has examined how economic development plans, including new e-development plans, reframe both material and nonmaterial property as new, valuable resources for development. Secondly, it will contribute to new debates in the social studies of technology, where research on the processes of networks of knowledge and technological production has developed. And lastly, it will expand on current research in the field of social movement studies that has investigated both the adoption of networked information technologies as organizing tools and networks as new organizational forms for collective actors.