Magnus Eriksson: Labbet utan egenskaper (2011) [Swedish]

Uppsatsen undersöker ”hackerspaces” både genom empirisk analys och teorikonstruktion. Hackerspaces beskrivs som ett fenomen som uppstår genom att människor med olika målsättningar och drivkrafter kommer samman genom en gemensam praktik och delande av resurser och kunskap. Därmed är hackerspacet självgenererande snarare än bestämt av en extern logik. Trots denna självgenerering uppstår en specifik praktik och ett visst perspektiv på teknikutveckling då utforskandet inom hackerspaces sker utifrån en specifik teknisk och social sammansättning. Denna praktik benämns spekulativ design vilken består av det konstanta utvecklandet av nya metoder och verktyg för att inkorporera allt fler möjligheter till teknikutveckling inom hackerspacets sociala och materiella sammansättning. Den konstrateras mot andra teorier om teknik och politik som fokuserar på tillgång till teknik, ingrepp i tekniska system och teknik som verktyg för att implementera en politisk målsättning.

Magisteruppsats Sociologiska institutionen, Lunds Universitet, Lund
Handledare: Birgitta Ericson

PDF
View online (HTML)

Lars Weiler, Jens Ohlig: Building a Hacker Space: A Hacker Space Design Pattern Catalogue (2007)

“With the help of Design Patterns we will show you how to set up your own Hacker Space. The Design Patterns are based on more than 10 years of experience with setting up and running a Hacker Space.

Before the Chaos Communication Camp 2007 the Chaos Computer Club received a question from the US-based Hacker Foundation that we should help them in setting up Hacker Spaces (or club rooms) in the USA. After the Camp they did a tour through Germany and Austria and visited a couple of Hacker Spaces. Each of them gave a presentation about their history and how they managed to set up the Hacker Space and keep it running. In Cologne we prepared a Design Pattern Catalogue with the usual problem you encounter while finding the perfect location and managing the community.

This presentation received a large acknowledgment from the Hacker Foundation. Now we will present the Ultimate Hacker Space Design Pattern Catalogue including comments and enhancements from other local Chaos Computer Clubs.

Attend this talk when you are about to start your local Chaos Computer Club or Hacker Space somewhere else on earth and learn from our experience!” (authors)

24th Chaos Communication Congress, 27 December 2007
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
85 slides

presentation

PDF

Andrew Famiglietti: Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians: The Political Economy and Cultural History of Wikipedia (2011)

“This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers.

I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia’s actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia’s content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles.”

Doctor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies / Communication, 2011
Dissertation Committee: V. Ekstrand, N. Patterson, R. Gajjala, D. McQuarie, D. Parry
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
290 pages

author

PDF