[Themaintainers] CFP 4S/EASST 2020 Prague // Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software

[mace ojala]

Hi everyone

I would like to invite you to join our session titled *Hacker Culture:
Understanding the actors behind our software* which we will be hosting with
Paula Bialski at the EASST/4S 2020 conference in Prague next August
<https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/>. This is *the* major annual Science
and Technology Studies (STS) conference, and a wide tent of research
traditions.

We wrote this call for papers with software/system/infrastructure
maintenance issues in mind, as we ourselves are sympathetic to these themes.

If the below CfP sounds good to you, please submit a 250 word abstract to
bialski at leuphana.de and/or me at maco at itu.dk (and this Gmail thing at
mace.ojala at gmail.com works too) by 17th of February 2020.

Hoping to hear from you, and to establish a good conversation in Prague!

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Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software

Paula Bialski, Leuphana University Luneburg; Mace Ojala, IT University of
Copenhagen

The spiralling changes around how we experience our social and physical
world have stemmed from the massive amount of digital technologies that are
ubiquitously used in all parts of our society today. Big data, offshore
data centres, universities, grocery stores run by software companies of all
shapes and sizes, are often hard to grasp and black-boxed, deeming the user
unable to participate. These infrastructures are constructed by a wide
range of “hackers” – a slippery term generally applied to anybody building
or maintaining software or hardware. They (or we?) go by a wide range of
labels such as programmers, developers (or “devs”), designers, analysts,
data scientists, coders, sysadmins, dev/ops, or sometimes simply tech. They
build, break, fix, and secure our navigation system, our banking database,
our doctor’s healthcare software, our games, our phones, our word
processors, our fridges and toasters. They work in massive software
corporations, in teeny startups, or in something in-between. They volunteer
for, or are employed by, free and open-source projects. While their work is
ubiquitous, hackers can hold a lot of power but also none at all – as the
software they are building oftentimes overpowers their capabilities of
understanding and managing it. Inspired by research around hacker cultures,
such as Chris Kelty’s work among free software communities, Biella
Coleman’s work on the Debian communities (2012) and the
politically-motivated hacker collective Anonymous (2014), or Stuart
Geiger’s embedded ethnography in Wikipedia (2017 with Halfaker) – this
panel shines a light on the people who build our opaque and oftentimes
confusing technical worlds. In doing so, we wish to challenge the role of
the STS scholar in describing the powers and agencies, and the practices
and struggles of hacker cultures – a challenge that, in our increasingly
complex, commodified technical worlds might never be fulfilled.

Submit To: bialski at leuphana.de

Keywords: software, hackers, culture, agency, data collection, ethnography,
computing

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

Engineering and Infrastructure
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-- 
Mace Ojala
ETHOS Lab (https://ethos.itu.dk) +  Technologies in Practice (
https://tip.itu.dk)
IT University of Copenhagen
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