Background
OpenCulture.cc began, more or less, as a research diary while I worked on my master's thesis for my degree in Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT). As with much academic work, and despite my commitment to interdisciplinarity, my research was painfully narrow, drilling deeply into the practices and technologies used by open source software developers, and in pursuit of a practice-oriented understanding of open source's success.
Current Focus
My motivations for this work, however, were always rooted in a very broad idea: that understanding practices of technological openness, both within and beyond open source software, is one of the key to understanding how humanity and society are changing in the information age. Filesharing, participatory peer-production, crowdsourcing, social media, the semantic web, even cloud computing -- all of these ideas hinge on a combination of openness and interfaces, which are used to create new forms of relationships between people, between code, and between data.
However, my interests are not limited to these techno-centric trends; I am also interested in government and corporate transparency, Gov 2.0, copyright reform, technology for development (aka ICT4D) and sustainability, social entrepreneurship, and community engagement . Again, all of these topics require or create various forms of openness.
As my graduate work fades into the past, these broader, emerging trends will increasingly be the focus for this blog.
About Brad
I started as a software engineer before morphing into a scholar and practitioner of new media and the technologies that drive it. While I approach my work from a very cerebral, scholarly perspective, I am also a deeply political being, and am always thinking about "the human element." In addition to OpenCulture.cc, I also blog for gnovis and at BradWeikel.com. I am @bradweikel on Twitter.
