Study Part 1

The first part of the study is aimed to uncover questions that could help us to understand the underlying motivations of this community, the borderline markers of its formation, as well as the discourse frames employed in its speech. The questions addressed in this part are: Who are the members of this community? What are their individual motivations for participating in the project? How do they envisage the IoT development? Why is it important for them to engage with the development of the IoT? These questions not only help to understand this community's formation, but also illuminates larger discourse frames at the core of the IoT debate, as perceived by this community. Thus, the entry points here are the perceptions of individual members and the analysis of their spoken language.

This part of the study is based on selected data extracted from the transcripts of nine video interviews conducted during the two-day public workshop at the Citizens Cyberscience Summit in London, February 17-18, 2012. The two-day AQE workshop was organised as one of the 10 Citizens Cyberscience challenges (a practical part of CCS2012). The two-day workshop was one of the rare opportunities for the ‘coming together’ of the key players of the Pachube community to collectively further the development of the AQE project, both technically and socially¹¹⁴. The Amsterdam community, at this event, was represented by the IoT

114Participants were from Americas, Netherlands and London.

Amsterdam community organiser Casper Koomen¹¹⁵, Alex Roester, a software consultant and lead developer of the first AQE prototype, and the ethnographer Dorien Zandbergen¹¹⁶. The New York community was represented by the two aforementioned developers - Leif Percifield and Joe Saavedra - but also, to an extent, by Ed Borden, the Pachube community organiser, who was himself not only from New York, but had close ties to the Sensmakers community there. There were also two members from Public Laboratory. In London, these two groups were joined by:

two young software developers from Pachube, Ilya Dmitrichenko and Owen Davies, both in their twenties; the aforementioned freelance consultant Paul Tanner; Alison Wheeler¹¹⁷, an open source developer and activist in her sixties; and Martin Dittus¹¹⁸, a community researcher in his late twenties, who subsequently wrote his MA dissertation on the Pachube data corpus. The events were also attended by the London IoT community organiser Alexandra Deschamps, who was also interviewed, and several others associates.

The interviews conducted vary in length. This was due to the circumstances in which they were conducted; some were held during the workshop action, while others were set as one-to-one conversations. While some of the interviews appeared in a publicly available documentary which was published online, for the purpose of this study I have coded the identities of the interviewees. This is mainly for ethical reasons, to anonymise the individuals, as the transcripts used here extend beyond the published words available online; and for reasons of abstraction as it is their collective voice that is of interest here.

By using the tools of linguistic ethnography (Duranti, 2004; 2010) this study of individual motivations and speech aims to uncover meanings people assign to the different actors and agencies at work in both contexts: the IoT and the community.

The use of words and sentences as a unit of analysis, coupled with context and gesture analysis can provide us a way to analyse individuals use of language, its relation to shared speech community, and perceptions about norms and cultural significants. This could be also one way to analyse the discourse¹¹⁹. Yet, in this work

115See more on his work here: http://www.casperkoomen.nl/en/

116See more on Doriens research here: https://dorienzandbergen.nl/

117See more on Alison here: https://alisonw.info/

118See more on Martin here: http://martindittus.info/

119See Duranti, 2010:133 on linguistic anthropology and the ways it relates to discourse analysis.

I have also adopted adopted the use of linguistic frame analysis to fore this thesis interest in larger IoT discourse, and this community's relations with other discourses that have bearings on their perceptions. The use of frame analysis is characteristic in the studies of social movements and collective action (Benford, 2000). The method of frame analysis was developed primarily by Erving Goffman (1974). For Goffman, frames represented “schemata of interpretation” enabling individuals “to locate, perceive, identify, and label” occurrences within their life space and the world at large (Goffman, 1974:21). Frame analysis helps to recognise and organise subjective context, enabling the representation of the lowest number of levels of frames and awareness that are needed to make valid interpretations of any particular piece of discourse. For example, the elements of the 'communication frame' include a message, an audience, a messenger, a medium, images, a context, and especially, higher-level moral and conceptual frames (Lakoff, 2010). The 'generic frames' are also sometimes called the 'master frame' but, for our purposes, we will use the term 'action frames'. Action frames are derived from the master frame, and are commonly used in the context of collective action framing (Snow and Benford, 1992)¹²⁰. As Gamson points out: “A crucial feature that distinguishes collective action frames from a schema and other related cognitive constructs is that collective action frames are not merely aggregations of individual attitudes and perceptions but also the outcome of negotiating shared meanings” (Gamson, 1992:111). Furthermore,

‘diagnostic framing’ (problem identification and attributions), ‘prognostic framing', and ‘motivational framing’ (Benford, 2000) may also be used in this analysis. The analysis will also adopt the measures for frame recognition, or what Gamson and Modigliani (1989) called the framing ‘devices’: metaphors, catch-phrases, exemplars, depictions, and visual images. Todd Gitlin has summarised the principles of frame analysis most eloquently as: “Frames are principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters” (Gitlin,1980:6).

120Benford (2000) has argued for the recognition of what he called collective action frames that

“function as innovative amplifications and extensions of existing ideologies or constituents of them. ‘Collective action frames’ involve the generation of interpretive frames that not only differ from existing ones but that may also challenge them.”