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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

The political ramifications of Free/Libre Open Source Software on network advocacy.

Timcke, Scott Neal 23 December 2008 (has links)
Research within the last fifteen years on global advocacy networks has often focused on their accomplishments through the linking of similar groups. The majority of this research while being useful to examine transnational political dynamics has two deficiencies. The first is that there is little or no consideration of the network infrastructure (from code to cables) that allows the aforementioned linkage to occur. It is therefore important to investigate the politics of infrastructure, architecture and design and the power and control thereof. Secondly, prior to Web 2.0. technologies, advocacy networks were nodes of information distribution, rather than nodes to which information was directed, and then subsequently collected, compiled and used for political purposes. It is quite reasonable to argue that Web 2.0. technologies (again due to considerations of code, digital architecture and design) have altered the manner in advocacy networks interact with their supporters, other organizations and formal political institutions. This change is located within the advocacy network’s technoorganizational structure. Subsequently, as the digital architecture for the internet is an inter-operable free/libre open source software (FLOSS) common to information exchange, it stands to reason that as an infrastructure this technology is directly a political landscape over which and in which friction and contestation can and does occur. In regard to the methods of interaction, FLOSS technologies have greatly expanded the pool of potential social activists and reduced the costs of engagement, activism and highlighting issues. With these factors in mind it can be argued that FLOSS has created opportunities for civil society to emerge and engage with society at large in ways that are both new (in a digital medium) and similar (tackling issues of social justice as constructed by the social activists). When considered at a systematic level this process has several implications. These implications include the impact of 4 networking on identity, social relations, power relations and so on, which in turn acknowledges that modern computer networking can act as a mechanism that radically restructures various political relations. This itself acknowledges various contests over modern computer networking (one position which is expressed by various FLOSS proponents), and the physical infrastructure and the power and control thereof which allows such networking to even exist in the first instance. Within this context, which could be described as an information ecosystem, there is a recognition that advocacy networks have emerged as new sources of power ready to exert influence through networking that occurs in a) a non formal manner and b) ‘beneath the radar’ as it were.

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