The Journal of Information Technology and Politics (JITP) held its 2nd annual thematic conference, the Politics of Open Source, at UMass Amherst May 6 and 7, 2010. The conference brought together an international group of experts examining the politics surrounding open source software (OSS) and the free/libre open source movement (FLOSS).
Day one featured a keynote lecture by Professor Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, who spoke about user-created innovation. Day two featured a keynote lecture by Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, who compared the open source movement to the obesity epidemic in the United States. The two very distinct approaches highlighted the vast diversity of research activity under the umbrella of open source politics.
Mark Cassell, Associate Professor of Political Science at Kent State University, and Daniel Kreiss, Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s Department of Communication each won best paper awards for their research on “The Status of Free/Open Source Software among Local Governments: Lessons from Three German Cities” and “Open Source as Practice and Ideology: The 2003-2004 Howard Dean Campaign’s Organizational and Cultural Innovations in Electoral Politics,” respectively. To read these winning papers, as well as those of all conference presenters, and to view presentation slides and videos, visit the conference website.
And, for another persepective on the conference, read Andy Oram’s comments on the O’Reilly Radar blog.
The conference was generously supported by Microsoft, Google, UMass Political Science, UMass Computer Science, Texifter, The National Center for Digital Government, the Qualitative Data Analysis Program, the Open Source Software Institute, and the Center for Public Policy and Administration. It was streamed live thanks to Panopto Inc.
JITP’s 3rd thematic conference JITP2011: the Future of Computational Social Science will be held May 16 & 17, 2011 at the University of Washington. A call for papers is out until January 1, 2011.