I recently completed my dissertation at the UC Berkeley School of Information and have joined the faculty of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. I will be continuing looking at software development and place, likely with a heavier emphasis on open source than before.

My research work seeks to understand how technical practices, such as software development, spread and remain synchronized between different places. My dissertation is an ethnographic study of software developers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In particular, I have been looking at the community formed around Lua — a programming language developed in Rio de Janeiro that has been recently gaining in popularity.

Before my Ph.D., I worked as a software developer at Quack.com and AOL Voice Services. I still write software in my free time, much of which goes into Sputnik — a wiki/CMS written in Lua, which I started as a part of my participant observation in Brazil and now maintain as a hobby.

For what it's worth, I am qaramazov on Twitter.

Recent Publications

• "Networks of Practice as Actor-Networks: The Case of Brazilian Software Development," Information, Communication and Society, Volume 12, Issue 4 June 2009 , pages 566 - 583.

• "Half a Century of Public Software Institutions: Open Source as a Solution to the Hold-Up Problem" (with M. Schwarz), forthcoming in Journal of Public Economic Theory. (Also here.)

• "Using Foreign Forums", Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40), Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 3-6, 2007. (Also here.)

Dissertation

• Coding Places: Uneven Globalization of Software Work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. [Ph.D. Dissertation], University of California, Berkeley. May 2009.

Recent (and Upcoming) Presentations, Conference Papers, etc.

• "An Ethnography of Globalization and Software Work in Rio de Janeiro," the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies, Washington, D.C., October 28-31, 2009.

• "The Source in Free Culture", Free Culture Research Workshop, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, October 23, 2009.

• "A Tweatise on Twitter" (with A. Gruzd and B. Wellman, presented by Wellman), the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 8, 2009.

• "Porting Lua," the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA, August 1-4, 2008. (This became chapter 3.2 of my dissertation.)

• "Behind an Open Source Project: Combining On- and Off-line Ethnographic Methods",Worlds of Work: Communication and Information Technologies, CITASA Pre-Conference and Graduate Student Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Cambridge, MA, July 31, 2008. [abstract, slides].

• "Jeeks: Developers at the Periphery of the Software World", the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, NY, August 10-17, 2007.

• "Technology and Identity in Brazilian Software Industry: what is Brazilian about 'Software Brasileiro'?", 2nd Conference of Brazilian Studies in Northern California, Moraga, California.

• "Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," CSCW Doctoral Colloquium, November 4, 2006.

• "Decaying into the Global: Construction, Decay and Re-configuration of the Brazilian Computer Industry," Society for Social Studies of Science, Vancouver, November 2-4, 2006.

• "Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," i-Conference Doctoral Colloquium, November 4, 2006.

• "Online Journaling as a Federated Community of Practice," American Sociological Association, Montreal, August 11-14, 2006.

• "Reading the Free Manual: Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," Informatics Goes Global, Bloomington, Indiana, March 3-5 2006.

• "Googling across the Equator," unpublished paper.