About Me
I am a scholar, technologist and activist. In all three roles, I am passionate about understanding why, and when peer production succeeds. As a social scientist, my research aims to explain why some attempts to create free culture and free software result in large volunteer communities like Wikipedia and Linux — while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. For most of my life, I have also participated in a number of these communities. I spend most of my time consuming, and increasingly often producing, academic articles, software, blog posts, essays, books and talks.
You can follow my latest musings and projects on my weblog Copyrighteous. I microblog infrequently as @mako on identi.ca which is syndicated as @makoshark on Twitter.
Organizations and Affiliations
Although it is not yet an active affiliation, I have announced that I will be joining the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Washington in my home town, Seattle. I will start in September 2013.
My active affiliations include:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology: I am a researcher and PhD Candidate in a self-designed joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab. My research uses the sociology of organizations and technology to study social structure in free culture and free software communities. My dissertation committee includes Eric von Hippel, Yochai Benkler, Tom Malone and Mitch Resnick.
- Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Univeresity: Since Fall 2011, I am a Resident Fellow at Berkman. I am pursing my own research on collective action and online communities and coordinate Berkman's cooperation group.
- MIT Center for Civic Media: I am a Research Fellow at the center which is associated with the MIT Media Lab and the department of Comparitive Media Studies. This is an extension of my work as a graduate student in the Media Lab's Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture research groups.
- Free Software Foundation: In addition to being an Associate Member, I am a member of the FSF's Board of Directors. You can support my work at the foundation, and support the free software movement itself, by becoming an Associate Member yourself.
- The Debian GNU/Linux Project: I am Debian Developer and maintain several packages and routinely sponsor the upload of several others. In the past, I have served on the Project Leader Team (AKA Project Scud) and acted as the Hardware Donations Manager (AKA
Project Quartermaster
) and Accountant tracking and managing funds and hardware internationally. My packaging work is documented here. - Ubuntu: I am a core developer an member of the Ubuntu project. For six years, I served on Ubuntu's Community Council governance board and help direct the Ubuntu Foundation. I was involved in issues related community, policy and governance and technical issues of internationalization, language support, and non-Latin text rendering and input. During the Ubuntu project's first year, I worked for Canonical Ltd. doing Free Software activism and advocacy and helping build user and developer communities around the distribution.
- Wikimedia/Wikipedia: I am an active contributor to several Wikimedia projects where I add content and edit frequently. These include:
- Wikimedia Foundation: I am proud to serve on the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that supports Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, with a number of other distinguished individuals.
- Wikipedia (English): I primarily edit articles on free software, intellectual property, and a whole series of other articles of interest to me.
Links: My User Page | My Contributions - Wikiversity (English): I have contributed to Wikiversity primarily through the creation of an extensive curriculum about software freedom.
Links: My User Page | Contributions | Software Freedom Curriculum - Wikimania 2006: To a small degree, I helped assist in the organization of Wikimania 2006 in Cambridge Massachusetts. I helped out the program committee for the conference and assisted with Wikimania Hacking Days.
- Definition of Free Cultural Works: Along with Erik Moeller from the Wikimedia Foundation, I founded this project to work with the free culture community to help provide a set of explicit goals to help the free culture movement development, inspire, and grow.
Please see my Additional Affiliations Page for a list of my old, dormant, minor, and more advisory affiliations.
Other Webpages
- Revealing Errors: A weblog where I try to reveal the power and influence that technology has on our lives by unpacking and analyzing errors that reveal the frequently hidden technological systems around us.
- Wikipedia User Page: My "user page" is similar to a homepage but it's in more flux (it's a wiki after all) and tends to focus on items that are interesting to me in Wikipedia.
- My Kuro5hin diary which is lots of short little descriptions of ideas I have. It's a lot less serious, useful (and hopefully) boring than the site you're reading right now. (no longer updated)
- My Advogato Page where I used to keep a (very infrequently updated) diary of my work on free software projects. (no longer updated)
- GPG Keys for use in secure communication with me.
Contact Information
Email:
mako@atdot.cc
Visit my contact information page for information on how to reach me via snailmail, phone, email, IRC, or several flavors of instant messaging.