About me 


In brief, an introduction to me and my history. But of course, they can't be separated, each one accuses the other. i grew up in Mexico, where I was born, Spain, Australia, and the US; by the time I was 18 I had gone to 21 schools and lived in an equal number of cities and towns. I studied literature at Berkeley after trying a dozen majors, and I still wish I'd majored in them all: learning new things is one of my greatest pleasures. That's why I ended up doing a PhD in English: At Berkeley, in the 90s, to get a PhD in English, or more expansively, cultural studies, you had to know an awful lot, and the usual joke is that literature was the last thing to know. When I first met my future wife, Tina, I think I was most impressed not just by her intelligence and general wonderfulness but by the fact that she had been getting her PhD in molecular biology before she switched to English.

Now, I am the community manager for OpenOffice.org , the open source project sponsored by Sun. CollabNet employs me. As community manager, I chiefly represent the project and coordinate community work. I now travel a lot, and all of it is unfunded by the project. OpenOffice.org does not pay my travel; rather, I am invited by conference organisers to present on OOo and open source. They see the value in getting the spokesperson for OOo to come to their conference and present on OOo and why it is important, and that is what i do. I probably travel too much, now. As I write this, I am sitting in the airport of Trieste waiting for a 06:50 flight to Munich and thence to Toronto. I then leave 11 or so of October for Stockholm, where I present at a business conference, then go on to EuroOSCON in Amsterdam, then Taipei, then Osaka, then its 2 November and I'm home. A pause of nearly two months then Washington DC for the MLA convention, where I am presenting two papers, one on Mark Twain, the other on open source and governments, and boy have I got a story to tell on the latter. But that is meat for another blog.

What is the relation, though, between what I do and what I did? In a way, sciencephilia can be said to thread the two. I still love literary discourse and analysis: things are beautiful when seen by the clear light of philosophy. But there is also the real fact of political relevance. When we first started graduate school, shortly after Michel Foucault had died of AIDS, there was still the incredibly exciting possibility that being philosophical, engagé, and sufficiently analytical was in itself a politically just act. We believed that by being critics we were being revolutionaries, not Ivory Tower dwellers. Pierre Bourdieu, marching with the workers, and the complement, in a way, to Foucault, was a living model.

But then as the 90s progressed that spirit seemed to die. Oh, to be sure, people like Berubé maintain it still, but I suppose the details of the situation came to play, as did, more importantly, the unremitting attacks by the Right on "political correctness" (aka ethical behaviour) and the terrible, terrible job market, which required, requires, will require absurd levels of "professionalisation" and professional caution.

Open source on the other hand captures much of the spirit of Foucault and Bourdieu and other engagé theorists: it strongly posits that there is a connection between the sort of intellectual flow characteristic of academic exchange and the economy of work. In fact, it insists upon that relation and claims that the way we work will change, must change, if we are to work at all with any degree of freedom and not purely as disciplined subjects in the infinite panopticon of patents and history and property. 

In brief, an introduction to me and my history. But of course, they can't be separated, each one accuses the other. i grew up in Mexico, where I was born, Spain, Australia, and the US; by the time I was 18 I had gone to 21 schools and lived in an equal number of cities and towns. I studied literature at Berkeley after trying a dozen majors, and I still wish I'd majored in them all: learning new things is one of my greatest pleasures. That's why I ended up doing a PhD in English: At Berkeley, in the 90s, to get a PhD in English, or more expansively, cultural studies, you had to know an awful lot, and the usual joke is that literature was the last thing to know. When I first met my future wife, Tina, I think I was most impressed not just by her intelligence and general wonderfulness but by the fact that she had been getting her PhD in molecular biology before she switched to English.

Now, I am the community manager for OpenOffice.org , the open source project sponsored by Sun. CollabNet employs me. As community manager, I chiefly represent the project and coordinate community work. I now travel a lot, and all of it is unfunded by the project. OpenOffice.org does not pay my travel; rather, I am invited by conference organisers to present on OOo and open source. They see the value in getting the spokesperson for OOo to come to their conference and present on OOo and why it is important, and that is what i do. I probably travel too much, now. As I write this, I am sitting in the airport of Trieste waiting for a 06:50 flight to Munich and thence to Toronto. I then leave 11 or so of October for Stockholm, where I present at a business conference, then go on to EuroOSCON in Amsterdam, then Taipei, then Osaka, then its 2 November and I'm home. A pause of nearly two months then Washington DC for the MLA convention, where I am presenting two papers, one on Mark Twain, the other on open source and governments, and boy have I got a story to tell on the latter. But that is meat for another blog.

What is the relation, though, between what I do and what I did? In a way, sciencephilia can be said to thread the two. I still love literary discourse and analysis: things are beautiful when seen by the clear light of philosophy. But there is also the real fact of political relevance. When we first started graduate school, shortly after Michel Foucault had died of AIDS, there was still the incredibly exciting possibility that being philosophical, engagé, and sufficiently analytical was in itself a politically just act. We believed that by being critics we were being revolutionaries, not Ivory Tower dwellers. Pierre Bourdieu, marching with the workers, and the complement, in a way, to Foucault, was a living model.

But then as the 90s progressed that spirit seemed to die. Oh, to be sure, people like Berubé maintain it still, but I suppose the details of the situation came to play, as did, more importantly, the unremitting attacks by the Right on "political correctness" (aka ethical behaviour) and the terrible, terrible job market, which required, requires, will require absurd levels of "professionalisation" and professional caution.

Open source on the other hand captures much of the spirit of Foucault and Bourdieu and other engagé theorists: it strongly posits that there is a connection between the sort of intellectual flow characteristic of academic exchange and the economy of work. In fact, it insists upon that relation and claims that the way we work will change, must change, if we are to work at all with any degree of freedom and not purely as disciplined subjects in the infinite panopticon of patents and history and property.  

Posted: Sat - October 1, 2005 at 05:57 PM          

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