Open Source Paradigm

As will be observed in this section, the participants in this community often evoke the open source framework when insisting that the development of the Air Quality Egg (AQE) and the examination of sensor technologies on a level of citizen science would not be possible without past attainments of open source software and hardware movements. While some of their individual practices would suggest their broader engagement with ideas of FLOSS communities, it is the particularity of open hardware contexts that, I would suggest, guide their chosen framing approach. In the context of the IoT, with its focus on materiality, it is the cheapness and ubiquity of technological components and open hardware devices, combined with collective knowhow, that has enabled this next stage of technological fabrication.

Since Eric Raymond’s (1999) essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', that re-articulated the early ideas of the free software movement and its radical intent for societal change into an open source rhetoric of efficiency directed towards broader business adaptation, the open source paradigm and its later developments (open hardware, open data, open knowledge movements) have been closely associated with the ethics and practice of a global community of developers. While the community aspects of OSS have often been shown to be fallacious (Krishnamurthy, 2002), it is its ethos and philosophy (Hannemyr, 1999; Jesiek, 2003) that still motivates many developments today, be it grass-roots community-based projects or open source military concepts¹²⁶.

126For example, see the grassroots movement of diverse patriots that work for and with the Department of Defense (USA), and who believe in adopting open technology innovation philosophies for defense purposes. http://mil-oss.org/

Similarly, for this community of early adopters, this primal association with open hardware development is often seen as a starting point from which identification with open source histories is navigated. This is well illustrated by the following example, which is a response to a question about the presence and manifestations of

‘community’ in the context of the development of the Air Quality Egg and other sensor-based projects. Speaker IC_4 immediately referenced the connection to the open source hardware movement, or rather identified the question of community with the broader community of open source hardware and software movements.

Example:4

1. I definitely think it’s growing.

2. One, with open source hardware movement ...

3. it’s been incredible …because em...

4. the access to these devices that allows people to connect to the Internet is

5. it's readily available... I mean

6. you can get a little Wi-Fi module that is a size of a postal stamp for 35$ now and that can upload any piece of data you want to the Internet in a lot of ways...

7. so... that’s really enabled people to engage in it, and then...

8. having something like Pachube is that glue that holds it all together,

9. that has developed all around this, and I think it's been both 10. from hardware and software side that allows people to really

just....

11. engage in it in this incredible way.

In line 1, the speaker's utterance is shaped by, and responds to, the question about the meaning of community in the field of the Internet of Things, marked by the indexical

‘It is” in the present tense, while lines 2 and 3 point towards another space-time domain in which the space is identified as continuous mass, in this case, the open source hardware movement. Line 3, with its indexical ‘it's’ followed by the adjective

‘incredible’ signals the on-going positive experience the speaker associated with the larger background frame that could be identified as ‘all open source movements’.

Lines 4 and 5 reiterate the particulars of that experience, such as in line 4: ‘access to these devices’, ‘allows people’, ‘connect to the Internet’. The indexical ‘that’ in line 4 refers to a prior portion of the discourse, i.e. ‘the access’, that ‘allows people to connect’ to the Internet.

Here the background frame surfaces as the speaker refers to the open source hardware movement and the discourse that surrounds it. The open source hardware movement has been around for many years now, and has the explicit intention of contesting control over proprietary computer hardware designs, or pull manufacturing away from corporate interest¹²⁷. The closed nature of many proprietary hardware devices is seen as a key obstacle for open public engagement with one or other hardware platforms, or in practical application - the possibility of geek intervention/hack. It is not true that people have no access to the Internet without open source hardware as many PCs, and especially Apple platform users, access the Internet via what can be called closed hardware systems. However, what the speaker here refers to (in line 4) is not the fact that people cannot have access to the Internet, but rather that it is their devices and, in particular the devices in the context of the IoT (as referred to in line 5), that ensure their access to the Internet. In other words, this creates a configuration in which people's access to the Internet is defined by the access of their IoT devices to it.

The clue to the indexical ‘these’, in relation to devices, becomes apparent in line 6 when the speaker brings up the example of the basic requirements for the device in question. However, before attending to line 6, we should briefly look at line 5 and the indexical ‘its’ that refers to a broader frame of the discourse at hand. What is readily available here? As line 6 illustrates, there are some particulars, such as off-the-shelf, cheap hardware bit, WiFi module, that can upload data to the Internet.

However, the ‘its’ in line 5 points towards the much larger mass and complexity in space and time. Something that is referenced again in the utterances (lines 8 and 9)

‘holds it all together’ and ‘that has developed all around this’. The ‘it’ in line 8 and

‘that’ in line 9 reference the same ‘its’ in line 5, and in all cases references the same thing - many bits and lines of code written and published by the open hardware activists, or bits of hardware that have been developed on open hardware standards from their conception, such as the low-cost microelectronic platforms (Arduino, 2004; Zigbee, 2006; Nanode, 2011). It also, most likely, includes numerous forums, IRC chat channels, mailing lists and open, and most likely free, code publishing sites, such as github.com. All this, and a large number of physical, human bodies that

127See more on a Open Source Hardware here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware;

and example projects here: http://opencores.org

make up the space of ‘its’ and ‘that’, that have been so ‘incredible’ and ‘readily available’, encompasses the histories of free and open source movements.

The indexical ‘this’ in line 9 refers to the upcoming portion of the discourse, i.e. a situation performed in the linguistic foreground, a development in current space-time. It could refer to IoT discourse, community developing sensor devices, data collecting/mining, or the broader citizen science movement. Line 7 is where the shift in space-time takes place. The first part of the sentence refers to the open source hardware movement (marked with ‘it’) and all that it entails (that’s), while the second part ‘and then’ signals the other space that has some additional elements, making it distinct. In line 8, the role of Pachube is made visible with its quite significant central role in the current discourse frame. The use of the ‘glue’ metaphor is powerful. It proclaims a unifying power, which is also made in the statement that it

‘holds it all together’. In the situation where ‘it’ refers to a myriad of elements that make up the wholeness of the open hardware movement histories, this acts as a rather powerful statement that not only signals the speaker's perception of Pachube’s open nature, and its role in the context of the open hardware movement, but as seen in line 11, makes a claim about its broader role as a tool for people’s engagement with the devices, and the Internet of Things phenomenon.