I am currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Before that I was a doctoral student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I do research on the social side of software work, with a particular attention to globalization and open source.

My dissertation (completed in 2009) described 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 in California. 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

• "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.)

• "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.

• "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.

Select other papers

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

• "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. 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.

Presentations, etc.

• "Coding Places: Uma Etnografia da Globalização de Software no Rio de Janeiro", Labjor, UNICAMP, abstract.

• "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.

• "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.)

• "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.