Re: CFP for a session on FLOSS at the EASST 2006 Conference

Following up our earlier announcement of the CFP 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, please note that the deadline now has been 
extended to 10 January 2006 (earlier than the official deadline of the 
EASST conference - 16 January 2006 - because we need time to make a 
selection of papers). For more information please see 
http://www2.unil.ch/easst2006/index.htm

Regards,
Yuwei Lin

> 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