Ruling Class Studies

From Medialab Prado

1 Resumen del proyecto / Project's summary
2 Planteamiento inicial (respuestas al cuestionario) / Initial approach (first day questionnaire)
3 Equipo (nombres y descripción de roles) / Team (names and roles description)
4 Datos / Sources, data structure, etc
5 Desarrollo / Development process
6 Tecnologías y herramientas / Tools
7 Prototipo final / Final prototype

Resumen del proyecto / Project's summary

Planteamiento inicial (respuestas al cuestionario) / Initial approach (first day questionnaire)

1. Describe the goal of the project in 3 sentences (which message do you want to carry? to whom?)
Ruling Class Studies (RCS) is a research project which aim is to produce critical theoretical instruments to measure the political, ethical and professional accountability of Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay (GFAeB) to their proclaimed missions, advertised practices and to a world where their monopolies are taking root. (more about project here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/30054819/Ruli … h-proposal )
The first case study is production of the map of Google's technical infrastructure, analysis of its design, categorized by rules how Google governs users' and developers' access to their data, services and development platforms. The map covers the whole spectrum from trade secrets (e.g. distributed fs), commercial services (e.g. gdocs), nontransparent FLOSS development (Android) to open process of FLOSS (e.g. Chromium).

At Visualizar11 I decided to do "Google Web. Chapter 1". I hope Android and Chrome OS will follow soon.
2. What are the inspiring projects and theories)? (background, context, references,...)
http://www.flossmetrics.org/
http://flossmole.org/
http://libresoft.es/debian-counting/sarge/
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/

3. What is the short-term objective?
Short-term objective was to make a minimal software dependency graph which is needed to make equivalent of Google's technical infrastructure. And to make estimation of how many developers, years in development and money one should need in order to develop all of that from scratch.
4. What is the long term objective (what posterior development do you think of)?'
As follow up, I would like to further develop this interactive sketch: http://bljak.org/~marcell/dtreejs/dependency-tree2.html

into something more like this (slides 33-36): https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhjm83rs_117fvhjppdv&pli=1

5. What are the data (status, where do they come from, who specifically owns the data?)
The data for software dependency graph comes from: http://packages.gentoo.org Other data mostly from my selection at:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F17743766485180924817%2Flabel%2Frulingclassstudies
http://www.diigo.com/user/marcell/rulingclassstudies
http://friendfeed.com/rulingclassstudies