Benjamin Mako Hill

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 @makoshark on Twitter.

Organizations and Affiliations

My active affiliations include:

University of Washington: I am an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication. I am also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering and I am affiliated with a variety of centers, programs, and organizations at UW. Details about my research are on my academic page. You can see my teaching page for information about on my courses, workshops, and lectures.
Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University: I am a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center where I am pursing my own research and where I helped the center's cooperation group as a resident fellow for several years.
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 and 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 as well as technical work. 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.
- English Wikipedia: I edit Wikipedia articles on many topics and often incorporate Wikipedia into my teaching. Good places to learn more are my English Wikipedia user page and contribution history
- Cascadia Wikimedians User Group: I am an active participant in Wikimedia events in Cascadia, I attend and sometimes help organize monthly meetups and other events in Seattle, and I am a board member of our (still inchoate) user group.
- I've helped out Wikmiania in many other waysover the years and contributed to many other Wikimedia projects. A more complete accounting can be found on my page on the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki.
AcaWiki: I have written and published hundreds of freely licensed summaries of academic articles on this wiki dedicated to that purpose. My AcaWiki user page contains more detail about my contributions and links to the summaries that I started.
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.