:: Celina

“Networking Democracy – New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics” was the title of the conference that brought together international scholars in the respective field to Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The symposium took place from June 25 until 27, 2010 and was hosted by the Babeş-Bolyai University. Organized by the University of York, UK, and the Journal for Information, Communication & Society (iCS), this conference brought together a variety of contributions on different topics related to ICTs and democracy. The student protests that originated in Austria and spread via Germany all over Europe was covered, too (see for example Alexander Banfield-Mumb, Christina Neumayer, and Axel Maireder). International scholars such as William H. Dutton, Lance Bennett, Bruce Bimber, Donatella Della Porta, and Brian Loader, were keynote speakers; Frank Webster also gave a talk at this symposium. Congratulations to Brian Loader’s team at the University of York, in particular Dan Mercea, for organizing such a great event.

Discarded phones assembled for a giant mobile phone sculpture in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

I’m just back from OSS2010, the 6th International Conference on Open Source Systems which brought us this year to South Bend, Indiana – the home of the Studebaker.

OSS2010 took place from May 29 until June 02, 2010 and was hosted by the University of Notre Dame, one of the top US universities – a very consecrated place, some may call it spiritual.

As in 2009 I attended the Doctoral Consortium to present my dissertation project and to get feedback from internationally recognized Open Source researchers and PhD students facing similar challenges and advantages of the research area. It was a pleasure (and also fun) to meet people from last year’s conference again and getting to know new ones.

Besides various interesting presentations of ongoing and recently completed research projects and plenary discussions this year’s conference organized keynote speeches during the lunch breaks, using the afternoon/jet-lag slump. The keynote presentations by Nate Oostendorp and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, however, were interesting and intriguing and made us easily overcome post-lunch drowsiness.

Photo: Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier at his lunch keynote (centre, illuminated)

Additionally, this year’s conference included a track on H-FOSS – Open Source Software/Systems in Humanitarian Applications, introducing projects like Sahana, CrisisCommons, H-FOSS, OpenMRS, or the recently founded OilReporter, supporting people working against the actual Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Please support the projects if you can – at least: spread the word!

Photo: Mark Prutsalis (Sahana), Allen Tucker (H-FOSS), Darius Jazayeri (OpenMRS), Deborah Shaddon (CrisisCommons, OilReporter) [from the left]

I would like to thank the reviewers of my contribution for the extensive helpful, constructive – though critical – feedback, as well as the participants who shared their thoughts, knowledge, and ideas with me.

And as mentioned in the introduction of this year’s proceedings: I would also like to thank the whole free software and open source developer (and user) community for providing us with such an interesting research topic!

The proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium (including my contribution) are available here: OSS2010 DC Proceedings.

My contribution: Raffl, Celina (2010). Open Source – Open Community? A Critical Analysis of Stakeholder Integration in Free and Open Source Communities. In: Scacchi, Walt/Ven, Kris/Verelst, Jan (Edts.).  Proceedings of the OSS 2010 Doctoral Consortium. May 30, 2010 Notre Dame, Indiana [65 – 77]. Download the Proceedings.

Twitter: #oss2010
FlickR: oss2010
LiveStream

We still accept contributions for the PhD Consortium which will take place on June 30, 2010 (whole day) in Castelldefels, near Barcelona. The PhD consortium is part of the 3rd International Meeting of the ICTs-and-Society Network.

Please submit an abstract of your proposal (about 500 words) to Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt at pille.vengerfeldt@ut.ee and Celina Raffl at celina.raffl@sbg.ac.at.

The abstract should give a brief overview of your potential paper, its main questions and problems, key theories, methods and empirical material used (if any). You will be notified about acceptance within two weeks. After that we expected you to submit a full paper of up to 4000 words (not including references) by June 15, 2010.

Further information about the PhD consortium including the schedule is available at http://www.icts-and-society.net/meeting/phd-consortium. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have further questions.