Debian flamewars as anthropological phenomena

My pal Biella Coleman is a geek anthropologist whose recently awarded PhD was given for a thesis on nerd culture, with special emphasis on free and open source projects. Biella's just released a fantastic paper on ethical dilemmas in Debian, called THREE ETHICAL MOMENTS IN DEBIAN, which you can download for free:

The third ethical moment I investigate is crisis. As the number of developers in the Debian project has grown from one dozen to nearly one thousand, punctuated crises routinely emerge around particularly contested issues: matters of project transparency, internal and external communication, size, openness, the nature of authority within the project, the role of non-free packages, and the licensing of Debian. Many of these crises have an acute phase in which debate erupts on several media all at once: mailing lists, IRC conversation, and blog entries. While the debate during these periods can be congenial, measured, rational, and sometimes peppered with jokes, its tone can also be passionate and uncharitable, sometimes downright vicious.

During these moments, we find that while developers may share a common ethical ground, they often disagree about the implementation of its principles. Though the content of these debates certainly matters (and will be discussed to some extent), my primary focus is on the productive affective stance that these crises induce. I argue these are moments of assessment, in which people turn their attentive, ethical being toward an unfolding situation and engage in very difficult questions. In this mode, passions are animated and values are challenged and sometimes reformulated. Crises can be evaluated as moments of ethical production in terms of not only their functional outcomes but also their ability to move people to reflexively articulate their ideals—an important condition of possibility for further action. Such dialogical and conflicted debate reflects the active engagement of participants who renew and sometimes alter their ethical commitments. Thus, crisis can be vital to establishing and reestablishing the importance of normative precepts.

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