Public libraries, public access computing, FOSS and CI: There are alternatives to private philanthropy

Stevenson, Siobhan

doi:10.5210/fm.v12i5.1833

Cited by 8 publications

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“…In 2007, one of the most important institutions combating the digital divide, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2004), announced a multi‐year technology grant programme for public libraries. This measure was but the latest in a long sequence of similar initiatives; between 1998 and 2004, for example, the Foundation installed 47,200 internet‐linked PCs in 11,000 libraries across the US and trained 62,000 library workers (Stevenson 2007).…”

Section: Public Schools and Librariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Digital Divides in the United States

Warf¹

2012

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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While cyberspace has become increasingly ubiquitous in American society, enormous class, ethnic, and spatial inequalities characterise access to the US internet. This paper summarises the country's digital divides in the early twenty first century. First it notes major market and policy forces that have led to the growth in internet access. Second, it addresses the changing social and spatial patterns of internet access between 1995 and 2010. Although penetration rates grew among all socio-demographic categories, significant differences by age, income, ethnicity and educational level persist but not gender. Third, it points to the roles of public schools and libraries as mechanisms to alleviate the divide. Fourth, it examines differentials in broadband access as the most recent manifestation of internet inequality. Fifth, it comments on the mobile internet and urban 'hotspots'. The conclusion points to public policy measures that could diminish discrepancies in access.

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Section: Public Schools and Librariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Digital Divides in the United States

Warf¹

2012

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

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“…At the same time, Gates' ongoing gifts of software come wrapped in their own proprietary discourse, ready for dissemination among recipient communities. 113 Continuing research into the relationship between public libraries and FOSS -not only as a viable technical and philosophical alternative to proprietary software, but as a modern avatar for labour -might prove enlightening. Second, while the concept of 'useful knowledge' dates back to the earliest days of the republic 114 within an industrial economy, and as reflected in Carnegie's library discourse, only that knowledge of direct (and indirect) utility to capital's circuit of production and circulation was promoted.…”

Section: The Wage Earnermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Economy of Andrew Carnegie's Library Philanthropy, with a Reflection on its Relevance to the Philanthropic Work of Bill Gates

Stevenson

2010

Library & Information History

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When it was announced in 1997, Bill Gates' library philanthropy programme attracted a tremendous amount of media attention. A central feature of that coverage was a renewed interest in Andrew Carnegie's library building programme. While identifying the historical similarities between Carnegie and Gates is an interesting exercise, failure to ground these comparisons in a critical policy analysis frame that attends to the political economy of largescale private philanthropy seriously limits, if not jeopardizes, the public library community's ability to respond to the broader cultural implications of Gates' library programme. Here, the radical philanthropic approach is used to frame a historical analysis of Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy as a response to the contemporary class warfare of the period, within which he was deeply implicated. Unpacking Carnegie's library philanthropy for its ideological importance in the struggle over the ownership and control of the means of industrial production provides a powerful analytic lens through which to view capital's updated hegemonic project, as reflected in Gates' philanthropy, which is designed to bring software and internet connectivity to America's public libraries.

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“…Indicatively, Scacchi (2010) concluded that FOSS projects 'are in many ways socio-technical experiments to prototype alternative visions of what innovative systems might be in the near future' on the basis of a mode of governance that effects a 'transformation in the marketplace of ideas and [in] the means of production from centralized authority with corporate enterprises, towards a more decentralized commons-based peer production'. On the same wavelength, Stevenson (2010) called attention to FOSS as an 'organizing vehicle for the world's information workers' and as 'a means to create more open and democratic political systems' (see also Stevenson, 2007), while , in a more recent paper that traces the policy implications of FOSS (and user-generated content, more broadly), underlined the way in which FOSS 'generates value, serves as a medium for cultural expression and allows innovative activity' (see also . Common to all these works is that FOSS is depicted as innovative.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of innovation in discourses of free and open source software

Dafermos

Eeten

2014

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In this study, we examine the relationship between innovation and free/open source software (FOSS) based on the views of contributors to FOSS projects, using Q methodology as a method of discourse analysis to make visible the positions held by FOSS contributors and identify the discourses encountered in the FOSS community. In specific, our analysis reveals four discourses: four ways of expressing oneself used by FOSS contributors, which, aside from certain commonalities, postulate fundamentally different conceptions of innovation. Whereas the dispersion of FOSS contributors' subjectivity across four different discourses is indicative of the diversity and heterogeneity of the FOSS community, their commonalities, however, demarcate a common ground that all discourses share: points of agreement include the negative effect of patents on innovation, the predominant role of end users over manufacturers in the innovation process and the embrace of FOSS licenses as a key enabler of innovation. In the conclusion, we outline some implications for innovation management and policy. Contents Introduction MethodologyResults: Unfolding the discourses Implications for innovation policy and management IntroductionResearch interest in software developed and distributed freely over the Internet by voluntary associations of hackers [1] known as free and open source software (FOSS) projects has been steadily increasing during the last ten years. Readers of First Monday (FM) are familiar with the topic. In fact, few journals have devoted as much attention to FOSS as FM, as can be seen from the publication of Eric Raymond's (1998) 'The cathedral and the bazaar,' which popularised the study of FOSS, and the October 2005 Special issue on open source (http://firstmonday.org/issue/view/212), to name but two milestones in research on the topic. Since, a plethora of works published in FM have highlighted the uniqueness of FOSS. Characteristically, Schweik and English (2007) remarked the striking divergence of the mode of governance of FOSS from that typically encountered in natural resource commons on account of the informal and non-hierarchical governance of the former, while Jordan (2009) emphasised the 'novel understanding of property' encapsulated in the development of FOSS, which effectively inverts 'property as exclusion to property as distribution'. The ever-increasing stream of contributions to the evolving FOSS literature attests to the fact that the scholarly attention devoted to FOSS has since only been increasing, often in directions that extent beyond the realm of software production. Indicatively, Scacchi (2010) concluded that FOSS projects 'are in many ways socio-technical experiments to prototype alternative visions of what innovative systems might be in the near future' on the basis of a mode of governance that effects a 'transformation in the marketplace of ideas and [in] the means of production from centralized authority with corporate enterprises, towards a more decentralized commons-based peer production'. On the same w...

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Public libraries, public access computing, FOSS and CI: There are alternatives to private philanthropy

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Contemporary Digital Divides in the United States

Contemporary Digital Divides in the United States

The Political Economy of Andrew Carnegie's Library Philanthropy, with a Reflection on its Relevance to the Philanthropic Work of Bill Gates

Images of innovation in discourses of free and open source software

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