CFP for a session on FLOSS at the EASST 2006 Conference

Dynamics in the FLOSS social world

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 
'motivation' questions (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)

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 (yuwe{at}ylin.org) and Lars Risan (lars.risan{at}tik.uio.no) 
by the 15 December 2005. 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.

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