Biella Coleman
From What The Wiki?!
I am a cultural anthropologist from the University of Chicago currently writing her dissertation on the ethical dynamics and political implications of the Free and Open Source (FOSS) movement. I spent nearly three years doing research on the Debian project and studying hacker and technology activism in the Bay Area. This year I had the opportunity to teach a class on hacker ethics and politics to undergraduate students (http://digitalgenres.org/files/syllabi/finalhackersyllabus.pdf) and have given a number of public talks on my research, including to the Debian community at their developer conference held last year in Brazil.
Next year I will be at Rutgers University with a postodc and will continue to work on my material on FOSS with a closee look at the politics of IP law. My next project draws from this research to investigate the use of expressive and human rights among psychiatric survivors as a political vector to make claims against forced treatment and to halt the global exportation of an American model of psychiatry. In the last four years I have been involved in various activist groups and projects, EFF, Indymedia, and Online Policy Group, and once I “ship� my dissertation, I look forward to resuming this work.
More information can be found on http://www.healthhacker.org/biella/
