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   Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 10:52:31 JST Glyph

   So, here's a proposition: those of us smart intellectuals in the open source world are constantly saying brave, insightful things like "open source is a social construct" and "software is made of feelings" or whatever, but has anyone sat down to actually *diagram out* the social relationships in the open source ecosystem? To straightforwardly analyze the social construct in concrete terms, rather than abstractly gesturing at its existence and lamenting that nobody pays attention to it?

   • Embed this notice
     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 10:52:30 JST powersoffour

     in reply to

     @glyph A *think* Howison might have looked at this? I don't have the citation handy but it feels in his wheelhouse.

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 10:53:03 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • powersoffour

     @powersoffour never even heard the name before so I am very glad I asked.

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     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 10:53:30 JST powersoffour

     in reply to

     @glyph There might be work by Herbsleb too now that I'm thinking of it?

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 10:58:39 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • powersoffour

     @powersoffour okay not at all sure who Howison is, but this looks like <https://s3d.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/herbsleb-james.html>?

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     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 11:00:38 JST powersoffour

     in reply to

     @glyph Yup, that's Herbsleb, and here's James Howison: https://james.howison.name/

     Some older stuff from Kevin Crowston might be relevant: https://crowston.syr.edu/

     I'm trying to think of others but I'm away from my desk right now, sadly! (I'm sure by the time I get back someone else will have suggested some good ones.)

   • Embed this notice
     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 11:29:19 JST powersoffour

     in reply to

     @glyph also I am feeling extremely guilty that I presented just a very small sliver of the vast work out there. I see you're engaging with some folks I deeply respect on here and feel obligated to note that I should have done better with the selection I presented.

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 11:32:40 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • powersoffour

     @powersoffour no worries, any info is better than none here, and these are good references to follow up on later! I wouldn't say no to more detail either, though :)

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:47 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @luis_in_brief @grimalkina that’s actually my question, really, is the taxonomizing of the relationship types. have there been any in-depth attempts to construct such a typology, or just the same shallow disagreements about entitlement vs. responsibility over and over again?

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     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:47 JST powersoffour

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @glyph @luis_in_brief @grimalkina I wonder if the "contributor ontologies" like this:

     https://force11.org/post/introducing-the-contribution-role-ontology-developing-a-sustainable-community-driven-approach-to-attribution/

     and CRediT:

     https://credit.niso.org/

     could play a role?

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:49 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @luis_in_brief @grimalkina so, okay, to get back to the question here: the "social relationship" in my thinking is a pair of roles that actors participating in a social fabric may occupy with respect to each other. I am really trying to avoid using the phrase "social graph" because of the connotations, but I am talking about constructing a model of open source that is a graph, and that has explicitly labeled roles for nodes and edges

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:49 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @luis_in_brief @grimalkina the edge being the social relationship, and each edge being classifiable as a specific type, with a direction. once you have this graph grammar, you can impose it upon a particular project to ask "is this the role *you* are *trying* to inhabit with respect to *this* person and/or company? is this the role you *are* inhabiting"

   • Embed this notice
     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:49 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @glyph @grimalkina it’d certainly be an interesting project! Of course first you need to settle on a typology and that’s been, uh, controversial

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:50 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @luis_in_brief @grimalkina (although I could talk all day about how actually, it _is_ bidirectional, but the referents we have for gift cultures in anthropological literature actually explicitly acknowledge status and honor in a bunch of ways that we don't in open source, with literal rituals and ceremonies and whatnot)

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:50 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @luis_in_brief @grimalkina (and we don't do that, and instead everyone has a bunch of different, unarticulated, implicit assumptions about how these relationships are supposed to work, and that leads to a lot of bad feelings, and basically I wonder if anyone has done like a serious ethnography before I try to just vibe it out on my blog)

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:51 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa
     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @luis_in_brief @grimalkina I think the love for the "gift economy" model and language is that it spun the subtlety of the bidirectionality of the relationship, where the gift-giver receives some kind of "status" or "honor" but it sort of gave up after vaguely gesturing that some maintainers eventually got good jobs. so yeah it _is_ functionally unidirectional but it is mischaracterized as an equitable exchange

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:52 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @grimalkina Consider this narrative: An author creates some software. A consumer then starts using this software. Author gives gift, consumer receives gift, consumer should be grateful. All rejoice. This (simplistic, wrong) model of open source social relationships is a single gift-giver to gift-recipient relationship, frequently gets described as "gift economy" in the early aughts. The giver-to-recipient relationship is transactional, and ephemeral.

   • Embed this notice
     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:52 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     • Dr. Cat Hicks

     @glyph @grimalkina and unidirectional, basically

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:20:53 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     @glyph if you feel like it, can you describe a little bit more what you mean by social relationships? Apologies if this is should be obvious to me!