PROJECT: Tennis forum collaboration

I chose this online community to help bridge the gap in my understanding of both the Open Source movement and the public domain. Like software developers, the members of the community have virtually no interaction beyond their participation on the message board (which is built on open source software). There are mainstream alternatives to this community in the form of tennis blogs and magazines that provide the equivalent of “firm produced software” because they have intellectual property rights on their products. In contrast, this tennis community is based around members’ discussing/debating various issues surrounding the sport and intellectual property rights aren’t asserted over its contents. Finally, this community deals almost exclusively in text, images, and video/audio files related to the sport. These are all units of creation that the public domain is concerned about.

Members of this online community collaborated to  created this image and text to represent their interest in the sport and to represent the community itself.  Like Open Source developers, they critiqued each others’ works and reached consensus on the final image.

PROJECT: Public Domain/Open Source movement

First off, apologies for inadvertently missing the last class. Final exams had me confused about our schedule. I would’ve really enjoyed hearing about how everyone’s projects culminated and I am sad that I missed it.

Here is a brief overview of my project in its three parts. Please feel free to offer any feedback/critique, I would really appreciate it.

Overall, this class has offered a great opportunity for me to understand my research in law and cultural anthropology in the context of other experimental communities. The public domain’s standard bearer of success during this age of increasing intellectual property protection has been the Open Source movement. An experimental community (albeit now a mainstream one) of software professionals looking for an alternative to the firm model of software production, I felt that in order to write about this movement in my research, I needed to understand how different experimental communities have been written about and contextualized in the past. Our various group presentations on everything from the CAE to the various cults have proved invaluable because they’ve increased my theoretical understanding of the community I’m studying.

I also wanted to understand the process of collobaration. The community garden and the day of silence both stood out for me as ways in which people have collobarated for a cause. One was an example of labor sharing and working towards a common goal, without a stake of ownership. The other was people connected across physical boundaries only through a common practice. Finally, the act of critiquing each other’s work was also an important insight into the Open Source movement which incorporates all these elements into its essence.

Project 1: Foundations of the Open Source movement. My first project was a paper that explored the knowledge creation model that Linux (and the Open Source movement) was based on i.e. repeated peer review and a credit economy.

Project 2:  My second project was an attempt at recreating some of the tenets of the Open Source movement amongst a smaller online tennis fan community. Participants chose images and text that they collobarated on to produce a collage that represented their interests in the sport and their notions about their own community. This project was an important bridge in understanding how the Open Source movement can have important lessons for the public domain that is mostly a collection of images, text and video based intellectual property units. The project and the subsequent questions in class after my presentation were key to my understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Open Source movement when applied to the world of images and text.

Project 3: Ultimately, the end of my project will be my Master’s thesis for my joint degree. This would be the scope of the project at its most ambitious. For now, I will add to my paper on Linux (and a paper I had written earlier on the Public Domain) to synthesize my thoughts on how this experimental community of software programmers will impact our understanding of the commons and what lessons we can take away to create a more robust public domain.

PRESENTATION: Thuggee

Thuggees were a group of people actively involved in the robbery and murder of travelers in India. Their presence has been recorded in the Indian sub-continent as early as the 13th century and lasting all the way through the 19thth century. The modern use of the word “thug” is derived directly from this Sanskrit original sthaga (meaning scoundrel).

Particular groups of thuggees developed methods of crime that helped them evolve from simple fraternity like organizations in the beginning to large crime families, preserving their secrets and initiating new members as apprentices. Their organization borrows from piracy, the mafia as well as religious cults. Certain large scale thuggee exploits have also been likened to paramilitary operations. Some literature even describes them as a military caste of Hindu society.

They flourished during the period when caravans were the main mode of transportation. Often, members joined the caravan to be attacked as bonafide travelers and spent a lot of time gaining the trust of their fellow travelers. They would also keep in touch with their members and communicate information about the movement of the caravan. Attacks were carried out as primarily ambushes across particularly rough terrains, desert land or when escape was cut off by rivers. Prefered methods of killing were strangulation but sometimes there were massacres that helped perpetrate the aura of ruthlessness and elite force of the Thuggees.

Thuggees have frequently played a part in folkore and were known for their ability to evade capture and plan strategies that lasted over journeys of hundreds of miles and changing terrain.

(A group of thuggess circa 1863, source: http://www.harappa.com/photo2/lufr.html)

PRESENTATION: Mujahideen

Mujahideen translates from the Arabic as a struggler involved in a holy war. It has specific religious and military connotations as it was employed by Muslim rulers/warriors who conquered land in the name of spreading Islam. Today, it often stands in for an “insurgent”.

Mujahideen are best described in the 21st century as armed warriors who subscribe to militant Islamic ideology. Their presence is established in various countries of the world but they are best known for their exploits in Afghanistan, Pakistan/India (Kashmir), Chechnya Somalia/Ethiopia, and the Balkan region. They however are also found in Myanmar, Phillipines, Iran and Iraq.

Mujahideen have been alternately romanticized and demonized in the public perception. As late as the Regan era, they were praised as “freedom fighters” and portrayed as heroes in hollywood movies including Rambo 3 and The Living Daylight.

Much of their training came through established Western (or pro-western) government agencies including the CIA, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - especially during the height of the Cold War and the Soviet war efforts in Afghanistan.

In the modern war against terrorism, the word has taken on important meaning as a renewed symbol of resistance to Western power. New encryption software known as Mujahideen Secrets was described “the first Islamic computer program for secure exchange [of information] on the Internet” on Al-Ekhlas (an Islamic news forum) in Jan 2008.