First Monday February 2005

Dear Reader,

The February 2005 issue of First Monday (volume 10, number 2) is now available
at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/

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Table of Contents

Volume 10, Number 2 - February 7th 2005

The media's portrayal of hacking, hackers, and hacktivism before and after
September 11
by Sandor Vegh
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/vegh/

Abstract:

This paper provides a thorough analysis of the mainstream media representation
of hackers, hacking, hacktivism, and cyberterrorism. The intensified U.S.
debate on the security of cyberspace after September 11, 2001, has negatively
influenced the movement of online political activism, which is now forced to
defend itself against being labeled by the authorities as a form of
cyberterrorism. However, these socially or politically progressive activities
often remain unknown to the public, or if reported, they are presented in a
negative light in the mass media.

In support of that claim, I analyze five major U.S. newspapers in a one-year
period with 9-11 in the middle. I argue that certain online activities are
appropriated for the goals of the political and corporate elite with the help
of the mass media under their control to serve as pretext for interventions to
preserve the status quo. Thus, the media portrayal of hacking becomes part of
the elite's hegemony to form a popular consensus in a way that supports the
elite's crusade under different pretexts to eradicate hacking, an activity
that may potentially threaten the dominant order.

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The social structure of free and open source software development
by Kevin Crowston and James Howison
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/crowston/

Abstract:

Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization
of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary
development by emphasizing FLOSS's distinctive social and communications
structures. But what do we really know about the communication patterns of
FLOSS projects? How generalizable are the projects that have been studied? Is
there consistency across FLOSS projects? Questioning the assumption of
distinctiveness is important because practitioner-advocates from within the
FLOSS community rely on features of social structure to describe and account
for some of the advantages of FLOSS production.

To address this question, we examined 120 project teams from SourceForge,
representing a wide range of FLOSS project types, for their communications
centralization as revealed in the interactions in the bug tracking system. We
found that FLOSS development teams vary widely in their communications
centralization, from projects completely centered on one developer to projects
that are highly decentralized and exhibit a distributed pattern of
conversation between developers and active users.

We suggest, therefore, that it is wrong to assume that FLOSS projects are
distinguished by a particular social structure merely because they are FLOSS.
Our findings suggest that FLOSS projects might have to work hard to achieve
the expected development advantages which have been assumed to flow from
"going open." In addition, the variation in communications structure across
projects means that communications centralization is useful for comparisons
between FLOSS teams. We found that larger FLOSS teams tend to have more
decentralized communication patterns, a finding that suggests interesting
avenues for further research examining, for example, the relationship between
communications structure and code modularity.

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A framework for Internet archeology: Discovering use patterns in digital
library and Web-based information resources
by Scott Nicholson
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/nicholson/

Abstract:

Archeologists use artifacts to make statements about occupants of a physical
space. Users of information resources leave behind data-based artifacts when
they interact with a digital library or other Web-based information space. One
process for examining these patterns is bibliomining, or the combination of
data warehousing, data mining and bibliometrics to understand connections and
patterns between works. The purpose of this paper is to use a research
framework from archeology to structure exploration of these data artifacts
through bibliomining to aid managers of digital libraries and other Web-based
information resources.

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Reflecting on the digit(al)isation of music
by David Beer
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/beer/

Abstract:

This paper is a collection of notes written in response to the main themes
contained in Martin Kretschmer's essay "Artists' earnings and copyright: A
review of British and German music industry data in the context of digital
technologies" (2005), which was published recently in First Monday. These
notes are intended to focus briefly on the exploration of these themes with
the intention of generating and developing questions that may open doors for
future study. The objective of this piece is not the review of Kretschmer's
essay; rather it is an attempt to probe, to examine, and to question its
findings and guiding themes. These notes, therefore, are left as a set of open
suggestions rather than defining statements. It is hoped that this fits with
the emergent and yet to be embedded field of study to which they relate.

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