Doctoral Dissertation Research - Information Values in Translation: An Ethnography of Free and Open Source Software in Vietnam

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This study examines how free and open source software (FOSS) change as they are designed and implemented in different countries. Recent studies describe how FOSS has emerged as part of a long history of 'democratizing' technologies. These studies show how FOSS has been designed as the technological extension of particular political values and thus represent a very specific configuration of American libertarian culture and politics. As FOSS is implemented in countries without this political cultural history, however, we can anticipate these technologies to change and even clash with existing values. In turn, this study examines how these values change as FOSS migrates into new countries. Internationally, FOSS is increasingly deployed in direct association with government policy intervention. Government involvement with FOSS has led advocates to decry such activities as antithetical to the very spirit of FOSS itself. Given this conflict in values, this study asks: (1) How does government policy shape FOSS' design and implementation in Vietnam?; (2) How do the values of openness, freedom, and democracy change as FOSS moves into new countries?; and (3) What other actors and organizations are involved in FOSS' design and implementation and what kind of say do they have in these processes? This dissertation improvement grant will fund fieldwork for one year of two free and open source organizations in Hanoi, Vietnam, one for-profit and one non-profit. This fieldwork will consist of participant observation of software development work in both these organizations and semi-structured interviews with their employees as well as with members of the wider FOSS community. The proposed research will contribute to a broader understanding of the meanings attached to a technology as it travels to new countries and contexts. Given the particularities of the Vietnam context, the proposed research will also contribute to a broader understanding of how cultural values can cause technologies to change as well as what happens with a technology clashes with existing values.