Episode 9 (2020): R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard - “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communities

R. Stuart Geiger calls himself an Ethnographer of computation and
computational ethnographer, and is an Assistant Professor at the
University of California, San Diego in the Department of
Communication and the Haligiolu Data science Institute.


Dorothy Howard is a Ph.D. student in Communication at UC San
Diego, and her interests broadly span across the psychosocial and
material effects of sociotechnical systems on society, and on
worker's lives and subjectivities.


In this session, Stuart and Dorothy will present findings about
the work of maintaining community-based free and/or open-source
software (F/OSS) projects, focusing on invisible and
infrastructural work. Many F/OSS projects have become
foundational across academia, industry, government, journalism,
and activism. Although F/OSS projects provide immense benefits
for society, they are often created and sustained by volunteer
labor. Their maintainers often struggle with how to sustain and
support their projects, particularly for projects lower down the
stack like software libraries, operating systems, or kernels,
which become adopted as infrastructure. Some growing projects
transition into non-profit foundations, startups, or corporate
patronage, while others stand against more traditional
organizational models and align with more decentralized,
cooperative, or ‘hacker’ cultures.