Anthropology Student Looking for Research Participants

[osanthropologist]

I am an undergraduate in Anthropology, currently writing my final year dissertation. The subject I have chosen in the Open Source project. I will be writing a detailed ethnography of hacker culture and am searching for research participants. Particularly, I am looking for Open Source user groups based in London in order to conduct live face-to-face interviews. Additionally however, anybody who would be interested in participating virtually is absolutely welcome. The focus of my work will be the way in which Open Source redefines the relationship between humans and technology. Additionally I am interested in examining the Open Source project in terms of the “Gift Economy”, an alternative vision of economic practice first studied by Marcel Mauss in the early 20th century. Anybody who would be interested can e-mail to find out more. Also if you know of an Open Source group based in London I would greatly appreciate any information. Thank you in advance.

[ksinkar]

Google for London Linux Users Group. You will find a mailing list at the least. That would guide you further. As far as the other ideas and interviews you would like to take; Llg onto IRC at webchat.freenode.net , goto the #gnu irc channel and many people all over the world will be online and will answer your questions.

If you really want to understand the opensource psyche, u should start using opensource software; install a linux distro; fedora 14or ubuntu 10.10 can be quite easy.

Use google for normal and simple queries. This query was very simple and that's y no one answered it for two long days. If you ask simple/easy questions or rather questions whose answers can be got by a simple search, the opensource guys will think you are stupid, and they ignore stupid people

[unlimitedscolobb]

Use google for normal and simple queries. This query was very simple and that's y no one answered it for two long days. If you ask simple/easy questions or rather questions whose answers can be got by a simple search, the opensource guys will think you are stupid, and they ignore stupid people

Agreed but for the "stupid" part: educated FOSS community guys don't call people names

osanthropologist, your project sounds interesting, good luck! I hope you will make the results of your research as open as is the community you are studying

[hazel]

Use google for normal and simple queries. This query was very simple and that's y no one answered it for two long days.

If you want to study people's psychology, you need to talk to them. It's not the kind of thing that can be done using a google search. But I would certainly recommend searching the coffee lounge here for threads on "open source" and "free software". There are some quite interesting ones.

[osanthropologist]

Sorry to all for the lateness of this response, sever technical difficulties. Really hope you still want to participate.
Thank you Sinkar for the suggestion of Irc, it's not something I've ever used before but it's perfect for this kind of research. I also have already changed my computer to run Ubuntu 10.10 about three weeks ago. Apart from still not being able to connect my camera it's been very accessible. I have to agree with Hazel however, that the only way to do this is to talk to people and gather real experiences from them.
Also, unlimitedscolobb, I wouldn't dream of not sharing the finished product, I just hope it's up to scratch!