Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses open source software development and the open source movement and critically examines their utility as a metaphor for conceptualizing the new politics of networked organizations. We apply the open source metaphor to the World Social Forum (WSF), which in terms of its Charter of Principles, and its notion of open, horizontal and inclusive space appears, as a new form of civil society, to embody the ethos of the open source movement. We analyse the forums since 2001, up to, and including, the United States Social Forum of 2007, examining them both in terms of the ideal of open, horizontal and inclusive space and in terms of the practices of the forums in advocating for, and using, open source software. The article then argues that both the concept of open source and the WSF are embedded in the realities of global digital divides and the struggle over access to the digital means to communicate, frequently expressed in terms of communication rights. We describe the role of the WSF in advocating for those rights and mobilizing civil society. We show how the WSF and its charter, which challenges corporate power in the name of social justice, must do so using networks within a digitally divided neo-liberal system, which itself must be overcome if networked politics are to be fully democratic and inclusive. The article concludes that issues of power, conflict, hierarchy and exclusion must be taken more seriously by supporters of open source and the WSF. That said, we acknowledge the contribution the open source ideal and the WSF have made to revitalizing discussions of politics and the political.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".