I am former software developer currently wrapping up my dissertation at the UC Berkeley School of Information(formerly known as "SIMS"). My dissertation is supervized by Paul Duguid, AnnaLee Saxenian, Peter Evans and Coye Cheshire.
In my research work, I focus on understanding how technical practices, such as software development, spread and remain synchronized between different places. My dissertation is based on 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.
During my free time, I work on Sputnik — a wiki written in Lua, which I started as a part of my participant observation and now maintain as a hobby. It has made numerous attempt to take over my life, but I have resisted so far.
As of November 2008 I in the United States, finishing the dissertation.
Recent and Upcoming Presentations and Papers
(Select chapters of my dissertation are available by request and may serve as better examples of my most recent work.)
"Networks of Practice as Actor-Networks: The Case of Brazilian Software Development," under review for a sociology journal.
"Half a Century of Public Software Institutions: Open Source as a Solution to the Hold-Up Problem" (with M. Schwarz), under review for an economics journal.
"Networks of Practice as Actor-Networks," the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA, August 1-4, 2008.
"Porting Lua," the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, MA, August 1-4, 2008.
"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.
"Jeeks: Developers at the Periphery of the Software World", the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, NY, August 10-17, 2007.
"Using Foreign Forums", Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40), Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 3-6, 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.
