Since posting the topic of my dissertation I’ve had some great responses from people I already knew and some that Google must have led my way. As part of the college requirements I had to produce a 1000 word draft that I wasn’t going to upload but because of all the interest I feel I should give something back. It’s really just a very brief summation of two of the books that have formed most my research to date: Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto. Ideally I’d like to just reference Raymond’s A Brief History of Hackerdom rather than waste words trying to summarize it in order to bring the average R.C.A. reader up to speed but re-writing it certainly helped me to digest it better. Anyway, download my draft, then read the whole of Raymond’s book (which really should have been, and be, required reading for both my undergraduate and postgraduate courses) then read A Hacker Manifesto to get to grips with the politics at play.
Also, if you’re interested, I’m hoping to present a paper based on my research so far at the Submerge 2005 symposium on Intellectual Property and digital production, 1st July 2005 at The L Shed, Industrial Museum, Bristol, U.K. more on that as it evolves.
