Via a recent Boing Boing post I learned about the work of Enid Gabriella Coleman (a.k.a Biella Coleman). Biella got her PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago and wrote her dissertation on beliefs about freedom and software in the Debian Community (‘The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition’). Biella’s work brings an awesome sociocultural perspective to a whole bunch of issues around the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Check out her full list of publications (all freely available online), but here are a few highlights:

Also check out the syllabus for a course she taught last winter called ‘Hacker Ethics and Politics.’