Free and Open Source Communities between Hedonism and Advocacy: Renegotiating the Distinction between Experts and Lays

• In Event: 338 - Section on Communication and Information Technologies Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Paper Session: Table 09.

Abstract

The Free and Open Source Community is divided in Open Source hedonists who just appreciate the benefits of collaboration and Free Software advocates who want the whole world to appreciate the societal value of “Software Freedom”. This sometimes leads to tensions between experienced community members and lay users. This tension grounds in the contradiction between the openness as a moral principle and the related advocacy for “Software Freedom” on one hand and the historic origin of Free Software as an expert community and the closure of the software development to a certain degree on the other hand.

I will discuss the distinction between users and developers as a distinction between experts and lays which grounds on different understandings of expertise and competence. Different Free Software communities have different normative regimes and thus different organisation structures. Basically this is represented by the construction of the distinction between users and developers

Moreover I will discuss an empirical example on how the roles of developers and users are constructed and negotiated in order to show the potential of investigating the practices of social interaction in Free and Open Source Communities. This provides insights about the construction of expertise in knowledge creating communities, and will help to learn about the technical rationality which is underlying this kind of communities.

Author

• Daniel Guagnin, Technische Universität Berlin