Hacker and Community, part 2/2: Defining Community

Writing about community reveals to be far more complicate than I firstly anticipated, maybe because I am trying to bit off more than what I can chew. I tried so far to enlace too many people in what I considered to be the F/OSS community. On one side, you have multiple “hackers’” community revolving around various projects, and on the other, you have users taking the most out of the system. They do share common goals: adapt the system to fit their needs. On the other hand, their practices to do so are completely different.

There is also the question of “space”. Do they share the same locus? Yes and no. Some platform and website are dedicated to development, while other are oriented for support and community chat. It is not rare to see “hacker” engaging himself on support and community forum and discussion list. After all, “hackers” are also users. On the other side, the open source nature of the various project make it easy for users to participate in various development task, e.g. doing translation. Hence the borders between those spaces are blurred by the flow of individual that goes from one to the other. Thus, “locus” can hardly be taken as criteria to delimit communities boundaries.

One of the interesting reading I made refer to Ubuntu hackers as a community of practice. Andreas Lloyd’s approach is very relevant. Here’s a big chunk of his thesis:

“In examining the Ubuntu hackers' day­to­day practices, I argue that the Ubuntu hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu system constitutes a community of practice around their collaborative work and commitment to the project. By positing the Ubuntu community as a community of practice, I explore how the Ubuntu hackers are using new technical and social means to manage and share knowledge and skills on­line, and how these means of learning and sharing are reflected in the system itself. 

I argue that though the Ubuntu community offers complete access to every technical detail of the transparent system they develop, the social boundaries of this on­line community are defined through the active use and development of the system itself. Because of this, membership and participation in this community is gained through a shared history of learning the specialized knowledge and social norms this use and development requires, making the group of developers a meritocratic group joined only through dedicated collaborative work. Thus, despite the Ubuntu system solely consisting of free software, the freedom it offers can only be fully appreciated by hackers capable of developing it. For this group of hackers, the Ubuntu system is the all­encompassing means offering them the freedom to fulfil their diverse personal, social motivations for contributing to the system. By building a system that works for each of them individually, the Ubuntu hackers come to construct a system which reflects their practices. But they also seek to ensure that the Ubuntu system, as well as the community of practice through which it is built, is open to all, depending on the users’ willingness to invest the time and effort to scale the steep curve of learning necessary to adopt, learn, configure, and even build the system according to their own needs, and master the core practices and social norms required for membership. 

I argue that this shared practice and history of learning to collaboratively build and maintain the Ubuntu system results in a careful mutual trust in the hackers’ complementary abilities through which the integrity and solidity of the intricately complex Ubuntu system is guaranteed, and which the many users of the Ubuntu system come to rely on. And similarly, it is through this reciprocal trust that the diversity of motivations and conflicting interests within the community of practice is managed under the reciprocal big­man leadership and ethos of a few prominent and respected core Ubuntu developers.” (Lloyd, 2007 : 10-11)

While it covers well the hackers’ uses of Ubuntu, I feel it won’t suffice for my needs. In order to look at software as contestation tools against copyright, authorship and intellectual property, the concept of community of practice might be short of use. Some authors (Szczepanska et al., 2007) approach the community identity's question using a foucaultian analyze of discourse. They argue that discours provide understanding on how collective identity is created and communicated. 

“Developing discourses is vital for providing the members of the [open source] movement with a meaningful context that enables creative software development activities across organizational and geographical boundaries. People feel a bond with others not because they share the same interest, but because they need that bond in order to make sense of what they are doing. Discourses […] enable members of a community to affirm themselves as subjects of their action and parts of a collective action.” (Szczepanska et al., 2007: 433)

Contestation discourse might reveal lots of information on the community’s nature and the bonds that tie them. I expect contestation to be a pivotal element to define open source movement as a whole. In this sense, it might also tie together different members, users and hackers, in the same community.

References: 

• Andreas, Lloyd. 2007. A System that Works for me: an anthropological analysis of computer hacker' shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system. Master's thesis, University of Copenhagen. Available here.
  
• Szczepanska, Anna Maria, Magnus Bergquist, and Jan Ljungberg. 2007. High Noon at OS Corral: Duels and Shoot-Outs in Open Source Discourse. In Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, ed. Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.