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Anthropologist Spends Three Years Living With Hackers
concealment writes "Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years studying the community that builds the Debian GNU/Linux open source operating system and hackers in the Bay Area. More recently, she's been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief. When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group's monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco's Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out."
According to the general comments with the article, the book has a creative commons license. The author commented that she will release a copy soon, when she fixes the website to go with it.
a marine biologist specializes in oceans, a limnologist in lakes. more or less.
Well, I happen to have been studied by her to some degree — As a Debian Developer who met her several times over the years. I don't know (and I did read the article — Sorry for breaking Slashdot customary ways!) why the article says she spent three years studying hackers... No! She has spent at least eight, probably more. And from knowing her personally, I know that she is also more deeply involved with the "hacker scene" (or hacker ethos, or hacker ways, or whatever) than myself. Which is not a little feat.
Clearly by the time I met her (eight years ago, in DebConf 4 in Brazil) she was by far not a novice, she clearly knew her work and had a very good model of our group. I have written some academic work on the hacker culture, and she is an inevitable quote. Other colleagues, more social scientists than hackers, also recognize the importance, truthfulness and insight of her work.
So, right, I have to fully, completely disagree with your assessment on a person who only spent 3 fricking years (as she put it "researching") comes out with her "immense knowledge" of the hacker subculture.