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Government agencies and public organizations often consider adopting open source software (OSS) for reasons of transparency, cost, citizen access, and greater efficiency in communication and delivering services. This book offers five real-world case studies of OSS adoption by public organizations. The authors analyze the cases and develop an overarching, conceptual framework to clarify the various enablers and inhibitors of OSS adoption in the public sector. The book provides a resource for policymakers, practitioners, and academics. The five cases of OSS adoption include a hospital in Ireland; an IT consortium serving all the municipalities of the province of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; schools and public offices in the Extremadura region of Spain; the Massachusetts state government's open standards policy in the United States; and the ICT department of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The book provides a comparative analysis of these cases around the issues of motivation, strategies, technologies, economic and social aspects, and the implications for theory and practice.

The gradual disappearance of paper and its familiar evidential qualities affects almost every dimension of contemporary life. From health records to ballots, almost all documents are now digitized at some point of their life cycle, easily copied, altered, and distributed. This book examines the challenge of defining a new evidentiary framework for electronic documents, focusing on the design of a digital equivalent to handwritten signatures. From the blackboards of mathematicians to the halls of legislative assemblies, the book traces the path of such an equivalent: digital signatures based on the mathematics of public-key cryptography. In the mid-1990s, cryptographic signatures formed the centerpiece of a worldwide wave of legal reform and of an ambitious cryptographic research agenda that sought to build privacy, anonymity, and accountability into the very infrastructure of the Internet. Yet markets for cryptographic products collapsed in the aftermath of the dot-com boom and bust along with cryptography’s social projects. The book describes the trials of French bureaucracies as they wrestled with the application of electronic signatures to real estate contracts, birth certificates, and land titles, and tracks the convoluted paths through which electronic documents acquire moral authority. These paths suggest that the material world need not merely succumb to the virtual but, rather, can usefully inspire it. Indeed, the book argues, in renewing their engagement with the material world, cryptographers might also find the key to broader acceptance of their design goals.

This is a book about the computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the people who made it possible. Unlike most histories of computing, it is not a book about machines, inventors, or entrepreneurs. Instead, the book tells the story of the vast but largely anonymous legions of computer specialists—programmers, systems analysts, and other software developers—who transformed the electronic computer from a scientific curiosity into the defining technology of the modern era. As the systems that they built became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, these specialists became the focus of a series of critiques of the social and organizational impact of electronic computing. To many of their contemporaries, it seemed the “computer boys” were taking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society in general. This book traces the rise to power of the computer expert in modern American society. Its portrayal of the men and women (a surprising number of the “computer boys” were, in fact, female) who built their careers around the novel technology of electronic computing explores issues of power, identity and expertise that have only become more significant in our increasingly computerized society. In a recasting of the drama of the computer revolution through the eyes of its principle revolutionaries, the book reminds us that the computerization of modern society was not an inevitable process driven by impersonal technological or economic imperatives, but was rather a creative, contentious, and above all, fundamentally human development.

The digital economy has great potential, but it also entails risks. The notion of personal property and ownership is under threat because of the shift to digital distribution and ubiquitous embedded software. This book makes a case for the importance of ownership in the digital age. It argues that the rights associated with ownership serve critical functions of promoting cultural preservation and innovation as well as protecting consumer autonomy. Technological developments and the aggressive efforts of IP rights holders, however, are gradually eroding the concept of ownership. There has been a disconcerting trend of courts bypassing the default rules of property law; the rights acquired by consumers through purchase are defined instead by license agreements drafted by IP rights holders or retailers. In addition to license agreements, IP rights holders also employ technological methods such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to restrict consumer use and protect their intellectual property. The matter is made worse by online retailers’ insufficient disclosure, which frequently uses words like “buy” or “own” to offer false promises of ownership. The loss of personal property rights has serious consequence not just for individual consumers; an important institutional actor – the public library – is also struggling to deal with the shift to digital collections and the corresponding restrictions imposed by IP rights holders. In response to these threats to ownership, the book explores legal as well as technological solutions, and presents a powerful argument for informed consumer choice in the digital marketplace.

The burgeoning use and transformative impact of global electronic networks are widely recognized to be defining features of contemporary world affairs. Less often noted has been the increasing importance of global governance arrangements in managing the many issues raised in such networks. This book helps fill the gap by assessing some of the key international institutions pertaining to global telecommunications regulation and standardization, radio frequency spectrum, satellite systems, trade in services, electronic commerce, intellectual property, traditional mass media and Internet content, Internet names and numbers, cybercrime, privacy protection, and development. Eschewing technocratic approaches, the chapter offer empirically rich studies of the international power dynamics shaping these institutions. They devote particular attention to the roles and concerns of non-dominant stakeholders, such as developing countries and civil society, and find that global governance often reinforces wider power disparities between and within nation-states. But at the same time, the chapter note, governance arrangements often provide nondominant stakeholders with the policy space needed to advance their interests more effectively. Each chapter concludes with a set of policy recommendations for the promotion of an open, dynamic, and more equitable networld order.

Human information interaction (HII) is an emerging area of study that investigates how people interact with information; its subfield human information behavior (HIB) is a flourishing, active discipline. Yet despite their obvious relevance to the design of information systems, these research areas have had almost no impact on systems design. One issue may be the contextual complexity of human interaction with information; another may be the difficulty in translating real-life and unstructured HII complexity into formal, linear structures necessary for systems design. This book proposes a research approach that bridges the study of human information interaction and the design of information systems: cognitive work analysis (CWA). Developed by Jens Rasmussen and his colleagues, CWA embraces complexity and provides a conceptual framework and analytical tools that can harness it to create design requirements. It offers an ecological approach to design, analyzing the forces in the environment that shape human interaction with information. The book reviews research in HIB, focusing on its contribution to systems design, and then presents the CWA framework. It shows that CWA, with its ecological approach, can be used to overcome design challenges and lead to the development of effective systems. Researchers and designers who use CWA can increase the diversity of their analytical tools, providing them with an alternative approach when they plan research and design projects. The CWA framework enables a collaboration between design and HII that can create information systems tailored to fit human lives.

Information retrieval in the age of Internet search engines has become part of ordinary discourse and everyday practice: “Google” is a verb in common usage. Thus far, more attention has been given to practical understanding of information retrieval than to a full theoretical account. This book offers a comprehensive overview of information retrieval, synthesizing theories from different disciplines (information and computer science, librarianship and indexing, and information society discourse) and incorporating such disparate systems as WorldCat and Google into a single theoretical framework. There is a need for such a theoretical treatment, it argues, one that reveals the structure and underlying patterns of this complex field while remaining congruent with everyday practice. The book presents a labor theoretic approach to information retrieval, building on previously formulated distinction between semantic and syntactic mental labor, arguing that the description and search labor of information retrieval can be understood as both semantic and syntactic in character. This information science approach is rooted in the humanities and the social sciences but informed by an understanding of information technology and information theory. The chapters offer a progressive exposition of the topic, with illustrative examples to explain the concepts presented.

We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity. This book investigates an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. The book examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years. The chapters present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering, and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

The use of open-source software (OSS)—readable software source code that can be copied, modified, and distributed freely—has expanded dramatically in recent years. The number of OSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net (the largest hosting Web site for OSS), for example, grew from just over 100,000 in 2006 to more than 250,000 at the beginning of 2011. But why are some projects successful—that is, able to produce usable software and sustain ongoing development over time—while others are abandoned? This book, the product of a large-scale empirical study to look at social, technical, and institutional aspects of OSS, examines factors that lead to success in OSS projects and work toward a better understanding of Internet-based collaboration. Drawing on literature from many disciplines and using a theoretical framework developed for the study of environmental commons, it examines stages of OSS development, presenting multivariate statistical models of success and abandonment. The authors argue that analyzing the conditions of OSS successes may also inform Internet collaborations in fields beyond software engineering, particularly those which aim to solve complex technical, social, and political problems.

Missed Information explores three themes about information and modern society: (1) We are neglecting information. Even in our Information Age, we pay more attention to information technology -- the means of storing, moving, protecting information -- than to information itself. "Information" is still the thing we get about other subjects, but rarely is the subject in its own right. (2) Information, on its own, is a powerful agent of change.The old adage, "Information is power", has never been more true. Neglecting information quality can lead to system collapse, as happened in the Soviet Union and came close to happening in the subprime mortgage crisis. (3) Better information and improved information access increases the efficiency of all society's major systems. The benefits of doing so are substantial: more citizen participation, stronger economic performance, better environmental protection and improved government and consumer services. Ultimately, better information allows society's systems to respond more effectively to our collective concerns about global sustainability, such as child labor, climate change, and chemical pollution. The authors examine these themes in depth, not only from the perspective of broad economic, social and technological principles, but with an eye to practical innovations. The book proposes mechanisms for improving information and decision-making in health care, financial reporting, government systems and consumer purchasing, and explores the benefits to be realized once the changes are made.

This book offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. The book challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, the book argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. It shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public's freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. The book's notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear. Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, the book explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today's press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” the book urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike.

Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. This book examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. Four chapters provide a synoptic overview along with illustrative case studies. The chapter on place describes how digital networks enable us to be present in physical and networked places simultaneously—often at the expense of nondigital commitments. The chapter on culture explores the growth and impact of amateur-produced and remixed content online. The chapter on politics examines the new networked modes of bottom-up political expression and mobilization. And finally, the chapter on infrastructure notes the tension between openness and control in the flow of information, as seen in the current controversy over net neutrality.

The field guide seeks to outline an approach to librarianship, librarians, and libraries based on knowledge, learning, and community engagement. The first part of the book covers the mission, skills, and values of librarians. Librarians are defined as builders of participatory systems to aid communities in making smarter decisions. The second portion of the book outlines libraries as institutions and as platforms for community engagement. The final part of the book outlines methods for teaching New Librarianship concepts including frequently debated points.

This is a book about obfuscation: the production of noise modeled on an existing signal in order to make a collection of data more ambiguous, confusing, harder to exploit, more difficult to act on, and therefore less valuable. It is a tool for defending and expanding digital privacy against data surveillance, and protesting the unjust collection or misuse of data. The authors provide strategies and an argument for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage, particularly for average users not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about themselves. Obfuscation also has applications for groups -- from software developers to policymakers -- who want to collect and apply data without the possibility of its future misuse. The book offers many examples, case histories, and arguments about the nature, function, and promise of obfuscation: why it is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

Horse racing has played a significant role in the development and use of new media technologies and media spaces. With the beginning of modern horse racing in the nineteenth century, racetracks became leisure destinations, with physical spaces that structured and were structured by social and cultural practices. By the late 1800s, in the days before theme parks, tracks served as vacation sites. The invention of an early computer, the totalizator, at the turn of the twentieth century allowed horse racing to help usher in the information age. The totalizator made pari-mutuel wagering, in which race odds are determined by the bets of participants in a gambling market, manageable. It also enabled near-instantaneous data processing of bets and posting of odds, and it facilitated networks that linked live racing with remote sites: from telegraph-connected “pool rooms” to late twentieth-century off-track betting facilities (OTBs). OTBs pioneered the use of non-ambient public screens, and the arrangement of social space around public screens. Interactive television and the Internet have moved participation in online pari-mutuel markets from public to private space, highlighting and challenging the traditional divide between public and domestic sphere. In addition, fans of racehorses use social media to share the products of their uncompensated and femininely-gendered labor, from fan videos to real-time information needed to rescue former racehorses. Indeed, throughout its modern history, the practices of horse racing have underscored the roles played by gender, race, and class in technology use.

Social critiques argue that social media has made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. This book offers a different view. It shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives—what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit—didn't begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today's digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it's part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life. The book refers to diaries in which eighteenth-century daily life is documented with the brevity and precision of a tweet, and cites a nineteenth-century travel diary in which a young woman complains that her breakfast didn't agree with her. Diaries, the author explains, were often written to be shared with family and friends. Pocket diaries were as mobile as smartphones, allowing the diarist to record life in real time. Humphreys calls this chronicling, in both digital and nondigital forms, media accounting. The sense of self that emerges from media accounting is not the purely statistics-driven “quantified self,” but the more well-rounded qualified self. We come to understand ourselves in a new way through the representations of ourselves that we create to be consumed.

Today anyone can purchase technology that can track, quantify, and measure the body and its environment. Wearable or portable sensors detect heart rates, glucose levels, steps taken, water quality, genomes, and microbiomes, and turn them into electronic data. Is this phenomenon empowering, or a new form of social control? Who volunteers to enumerate bodily experiences, and who is forced to do so? Who interprets the resulting data? How does all this affect the relationship between medical practice and self care, between scientific and lay knowledge? Quantified examines these and other issues that arise when biosensing technologies become part of everyday life. The book offers a range of perspectives, with views from the social sciences, cultural studies, journalism, industry, and the nonprofit world. The contributors consider data, personhood, and the urge to self-quantify; legal, commercial, and medical issues, including privacy, the outsourcing of medical advice, and self-tracking as a “paraclinical” practice; and technical concerns, including interoperability, sociotechnical calibration, alternative views of data, and new space for design. Contributors: Marc Böhlen, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Sophie Day, Anna de Paula Hanika, Deborah Estrin, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, Dana Greenfield, Judith Gregory, Mette Kragh-Furbo, Celia Lury, Adrian Mackenzie, Rajiv Mehta, Maggie Mort, Dawn Nafus, Gina Neff, Helen Nissenbaum, Heather Patterson, Celia Roberts, Jamie Sherman, Alex Taylor, Gary Wolf

Innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) fuels the growth of the global economy. How ICT markets evolve depends on politics and policy, and since the 1950s, periodic overhauls of ICT policy have transformed competition and innovation. For example, in the 1980s and the 1990s, a revolution in communication policy (the introduction of sweeping competition) also transformed the information market. Today, the diffusion of Internet, wireless, and broadband technology; growing modularity in the design of technologies; distributed computing infrastructures; and rapidly changing business models signal another shift. This pathbreaking examination of ICT from a political economy perspective argues that continued rapid innovation and economic growth require new approaches in global governance which will reconcile diverse interests and enable competition to flourish. The authors (two of whom were architects of international ICT policy reforms in the 1990s) discuss this crucial turning point in both theoretical and practical terms.

Many pioneering works of electronic literature are now largely inaccessible because of changes in hardware, software, and platforms. The virtual disappearance of these works--created on floppy disks, in Apple’s defunct HyperCard, and on other early systems and platforms--not only puts important electronic literary work out of reach but also signals the fragility of most works of culture in the digital age. In response, Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop have been working to document and preserve electronic literature, work that has culminated in the Pathfinders project and its series of “Traversals”--video and audio recordings of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works. In Traversals, Moulthrop and Grigar mine this material to examine four influential early works: Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger (1986), John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1993), Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) and Bill Bly’s We Descend (1997), offering “deep readings” that consider the works as both literary artifacts and computational constructs. For each work, Moulthrop and Grigar explore the interplay between the text’s material circumstances and the patterns of meaning it engages and creates, paying attention both to specificities of media and purposes of expression.

In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (which shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. This book investigates choices such as these made by high-tech workers in New York City’s “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs—investing time, energy, and other personal resources that the author terms “venture labor”—when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? The author argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, the author finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments which support workers.