Focusing on the popularization of non-proprietary (NPS) software in France, this Social and Behavioral Sciences Dissertation Improvement Grant illuminates the emergent strategic and political uses of computer technology in transnational activism while also exploring how they are inflected through national discourses, anxieties and histories. NPS (also called "open source" or "free software," e.g. Linux) regroups a variety of initiatives and agendas worldwide; however, in France it has been made into a prominent political and cultural cause. This project investigates how the French NPS activists catalyze support for a politicized vision of computer technology, by asking: (1) How do claims about the democratizing potential of NPS in France draw on and feed into longstanding national conceptions of technological innovation and of public service? (2) How does the NPS movement's commitment to invigorating the "public good" in France resonate with efforts to resituate France internationally? To answer these questions, the co-PI will work with four of the most active and well-established NPS associations in France, all based in Paris and selected to capture a cross-section of persons and missions in this movement. She will employ participant observation (in voluntary associations, NPS-related gatherings, on-line debates and collaborations), in-depth interviews, network analysis, and analysis of websites, online archives and media representations related to NPS in France. This study will intervene in literature that privileges the transnational potential of computation and computer networks for democratic and/or corporate expansion by looking at a case in which local actors, through a conjunction of online and face-to-face interactions, inflect computer technology with specifically national framings and effects. To do so, this project will (1) map out the relationships, activities and debates around the NPS in France; (2) illuminate how the practices of the NPS advocacy and popularization give meanings to the vision of democratization through technology; (3) track how the NPS notion of "public good" in France implicates a certain vision of the nation. Beyond mapping the variegated field of non-proprietary software production and advocacy, this project will contribute an anthropological perspective to cross-cultural understanding of computing, national and transnational dimensions of technological innovation, and the role of the Internet in cultural and political activism. Computing is increasingly understood to be the infrastructure for research and education; yet, social scientists have only begun to investigate the cultural and political dimensions of computer technology. This research will illuminate the cultures of computing by considering the networks of actors, claims and practices that ground, and are constituted by, the vision of democratization through the diffusion of technological development. By tracking how a "geek counterculture" is maintained, refracted, or disavowed through a broad social movement, this research will foreground conditions in which NPS can potentially catalyze a broader trend of strategic use of computer technology. Further, it will illuminate the meanings of computer literacy in stratified national and transnational spheres, delineating how and for whom specific practices of computing might indeed be successful or democratizing, and which groups might be underrepresented in such initiatives. This project will provide groundwork for understanding how politicized activism around, and increasingly relying on, computer technology, can advance or limit the participation of diverse groups in scientific research or education.
