Study Part 3

The public coming together of the key advocates of the Open IoT, and collective deliberation during the two-day Open IoT Assembly, served as the field site and the entry point for the third part of this study. This part aims to illuminate the political and power relations that not only mark the borderlines of this community, but also crystallises the conflicts within the broader IoT discourse. This part looks at questions such as: What matters most for this community in the context of wider IoT debates, and why? How, by means of language analysis, can we crystallise the perceptions of emerging issues in the IoT context.

The Open IoT Assembly took place June 16-17, 2012 at the London Google Campus.

This was the largest, and the final, public event organised by the Pachube community, and its aim was not only to gather key players of IoT at that time, but also to collectively develop principles for the Open Internet of Things, or what they called the Open IoT Bill of Rights. During the two-day event, a total of 16 hours of footage was captured, covering almost all the events taking place in the main hall¹²¹, with the exception of one keynote speaker who explicitly asked not to be recorded. A total of 22 separate events were identified. These were four keynotes, eight group

121The number of parallel group discussions also meant that some of these were only recorded partially and that, at times, there were sound overlaps that later presented difficulty for the transcription process.

sessions, three unconference events, one panel, two round-up events and four interviews. Those segments were later transcribed, and formed the core of the data corpus used in this part. The main data corpus is made up of 69024 words. The video recordings were made on two separate digital cameras. While there were about 100 participants in the physical space, many joined the discussions online, most notably on Twitter.com with the marker #OpneIoT. The research is also informed by these tweets, a total of 684made by 93 individuals. The majority, a total of 138 tweets, was made by one individual, and one tweet was made by the Bablino - an early example of an IoT blogject, a bubble machine that spits out bubbles if its own name is mentioned on Twitter¹²². T he f ee ds wer e al so ag gr eg at e d l i ve on www.scribblelive.com. Other Open IoT content that has informed this study has been retrieved from online outlets such as prezi.com, flickr.com, postscapes.com, storify.com, and lanyrd.com.

To determine the common concerns across this two-day event, the quantitative method was applied to identify the most uttered words in this data corpus. The analysis of the combinations of words was then carried out to identify which words were mostly associated with each of the top five identified concepts, and the combinations of which scored the highest, and in what contexts. After this statistical analysis, methods of discourse analysis (Ellingson, 1995; Fairclough, 1995), frame analysis (Gitlin,1980; Benford, 2000; Lakoff, 2010) and thick description (Geertz, 1973) were applied to further unravel the meanings of the key concepts in the different speaker utterances.

3.5. Conclusion

This chapter has addressed the issues related to the framing of this study, the nature of the community, the data corpus, and the methods of data collection and analysis.

First, the chapter unveiled the framing of this study. The overall study was framed both as an intrinsic and instrumental case study. While it aims to provide rich insight into a historically-located phenomenon, i.e. the workings and processes of one group of early IoT adopters, I argued along with Stake (2008) and Yin (2003), that the role

122For the duration of the Open IoT Assembly, Bablino also responded on #openiot.

of the case study is to act as an exploratory tool that, in the case of this thesis, helps to expand and generate theory about social practice, and its contexts - the IoT.

Second, the chapter addresses the strategies relevant for the initial analysis of this community's formation and why I came to address them in terms of a community of practice, in a context where other naming strategies could have been applied. I have argued that it was the focus of their practice and the insistence of this community's participants that has led me to frame their initial identity in terms of the community of practice. I also highlighted the fact that during the two years of my observations, the community formation endured several transformations, contexts of which make other conceptual frameworks relevant. Furthermore, to acknowledge the fluidity and changing nature of any framing activity, it was indicated that the first part of the study would pursue an in in-depth analysis of the participants’ own perceptions on what constitutes this community, its borderlines and associations. Thus, at this stage, any rigid frame application could only be used as a starting point for this investigation.

Following this, the chapter discussed the nature of the ethnographic approach, i.e.

study field as a network, and the chosen methods of data gathering and analysis. I argued that the nature of this community, its geographic distribution and temporary nature, required a multi-method approach. The chapter then looked at the number of ethnographic approaches adopted. Besides the use of classical ethnography and its methods of observation, the chapter has highlighted the use of action ethnography -in particular, its use -in a context of data gather-ing, virtual ethnography, and its application in the study of online spaces and content - and the use of linguistic ethnography in the analysis of the participants’ language, both spoken and written.

Finally, the chapter laid out the premise for each section of this three part study, the nature of the total data corpus, and the specific data corpus components utilised in each of the segments. As indicated, the first part of this study aims to address the participants’ own perceptions on what constitutes this community and the IoT. The core data used in this part is one-to-one interviews with participants, primarily collected during the two-day workshop in 2012 that brought together developers from Amsterdam, London and New York. As human knowledge is language-bound,

the linguistic analysis of grammatical markers, context frames and units of participation is the method chosen to access participant perceptual strata. To address the matters of practice, the second part of this study will use a multi-ethnographic approach in the analysis of: the organisational and design methods employed, the spatial practices, the success or breakdown of campaigns, the nature of created devices, the AQE network, and the legacy of this community’s collective action. The multitude of data sources and methods used in the analysis were discussed. The third part of this study will return to the linguistic analysis of the participants’ speech to identify the key concerns in the IoT domain. The data corpus, comprised of conversational data and speech utterances, collected during the two-day assembly of the network of the Open IoT advocates, is used in this segment of the study.

PART II