This dissertation would not have been possible without the many people who have in various forms provided support, guidance and inspiration. A brief mention in the acknowledgements cannot repay all the debts nor is it possible to acknowledge everyone who has helped me complete this work.

Paul Duguid’s Social Life of Information introduced me to many of the questions that this dissertation addresses even before I was aware of the existence of the School of Information. Paul’s arrival the School in 2004 has been a true blessing for me. While Paul’s own work has led me to expect the intellectual stimulation that I have found in my many conversations with him, it did not prepare me for his generosity and his dedication to the success of this project. Working with Paul has been an amazing experience.

I am also tremendously indebted to the other members of my dissertation committee, who have all inspired me with their own work and have put much time into helping me improve the dissertation. Anno Saxenian’s work on transnational connections has set an example for me from my early days at the School of Information and has encouraged me to do international research. Peter Evans’s work introduced me to the history of Brazilian IT policy. His continuous insistence on hearing “the point” of my work has helped me sharpen my arguments. Coye Cheshire has helped me think about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the methods used in my work.

Peter Lyman, under whose supervision I started my program at Berkeley, must be mentioned alongside my committee. I am grateful to Peter for convincing me to come to Berkeley, for introducing me to ethnography as a research method, and for securing funding for my research. He is and will be greatly missed.

Many other Berkeley faculty members have contributed to my learning at Berkeley. I particularly want to thank Jean Lave, Suzanne Scotchmer, Michael Buckland, Nancy Van House, Ray Larson, Ted Egan, and Raka Ray for introducing me to many new ideas and providing suggestions for my work.

Luisa Farah Schwartzman has seen more revisions of this dissertation than anyone else (with the possible exception of Paul Duguid). She has helped me reduce the amount of technical jargon in my writing, and to increase the number of definite articles. Having a native speaker of Portuguese around and ready to help decipher the most enigmatic passages in my recordings undoubtedly qualifies as an unfair advantage. Working on our dissertations at the same time, we gradually found more and more intersections in our bibliography, despite the seemingly unrelated topics. We have jokingly argued about who stole whose ideas. I may never be able to fully appreciate Luisa’s impact on my work.

Over one hundred people have generously volunteered their time to tell me about their lives and work. This dissertation would not be possible without their courage to share their stories with a stranger. Many of those people also helped me feel at home in a new city. Some have become friends. Many of my interviewees have volunteered to read chapters of this dissertation, finding factual errors, misinterpretations, inconsistencies, and often simply grammatical mistakes. I am particularly grateful to “Rodrigo” for his willingness to talk openly about the many challenges facing his project, for introducing me to many of the people on whose stories this dissertation relies, and for tolerating my straddling of fieldwork and friendship. I thank Roberto Ierusalimschy and Luiz Henrique Figueiredo for our discussions about the past, present and future of Lua and for their comments on the dissertation. I thank the members of the Kepler team and Alta’s developers for tolerating a resident ethnographer in their midst.

Analysis of the interviews would be much harder without access to transcription. I have done just enough transcription myself to know how difficult this work is. I thank Siobhan Hayes, Eva do Rego Barros, Rosa Paiva, Eliodora Besser, Patricia Martinez Alzueta, and Mariana Timponi for their work. I thank Marcelo Besser and LoGoS Traduções e Consultoria for organizing the process.

Conversations with Brazilian scholars have helped me better understand the local context and Brazil’s history. I am particularly thankful to Paulo Tigre, Ivan da Costa Marques, Sidney Oliveira de Castro, Henrique Cukierman, Antonio Botelho, Nelson Senra, and Simon Schwartzman. I thank the Institute of Economics of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro for hosting me in 2005.

Fellow students at the School of Information have helped make my time here enjoyable and productive. The diversity of their interests has introduced me to a variety of ways of thinking about information technology, compensating for the narrow specialization inherent in a doctoral program. I thank Jens Grossklags, Paul Laskowski, Joseph Hall, danah boyd, and Mahad Ibrahim for helping me stay on track. They have been a great cohort. I thank Dan Perkel, Megan Finn, Ryan Shaw, Christo Sims, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, and Bob Bell, for attending numerous practice talks, providing suggestions, and being a great group to be around. I thank Arthur Law and Sean Savage for helping me remember that there is life outside the doctoral program and that San Francisco is a wonderful city.

I thank my family for their support over the years. My parents have helped lay the foundation of my own globalization projects. My father’s global dreams and his ability to imagine his children’s future education abroad even before the fall of the Berlin Wall has helped bring me from Vladivostok to California. He introduced me to my first computer and I often remember our long conversations about the nature of information nearly two decades ago. My mother has contributed greatly to my international adventure by helping me develop a passion for foreign languages.

This dissertation is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-0724707, by the Berkeley Fellowship, and by Yahoo! Research Key Technical Challenges Grant.