Sputnik: Background

Anonymous users must enter captcha below.

Page Name (for URL)

Page Title

Don't put anything here

Advanced Fields

Page Content

Sputnik's background story is perhaps a bit stranger than that of many
other open source projects.  To make it simpler, I ([Yuri](http://takhteyev.org),
the author of most of Sputnik) will write it in the first person.

I am from [Vladivostok](http://www.freewisdom.org/en/all/entries/2007/06/30/speaking_of_war/),
Russia, was educated in US, worked in California for a few years in the software industry,
then started a Ph.D. program at
[UC Berkeley School of Information](http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/).
<a href="http://www.freewisdom.org/en/yuri/albums/2007-07-16-b-genipabu/20070716_051_5200/"><img  border="0" src="http://media.freewisdom.org/freewisdom/albums/2007-07-16-b-genipabu/20070716_051_5200.thumb.jpg" align="right" style="padding: 10px"/></a>
I was looking for a research project in the field at the intersection of information studies,
sociology of knowledge and sociology of technology, with some sort of international twist, so
in 2005 I went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to do interviews with Brazilian software developments
to understand their take on things.  In late February of 2007 I went back to Rio to do another
round of interviews and a bit of
[participant observation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation), this time
focusing on small number of software projects based in Brazil. I started by looking closer
at [Lua](http://www.lua.org/) and [Kepler](http://www.keplerproject.org/), which is a project
(also based in Rio) dedicated to developing a web platform based on Lua.  In case of Kepler,
I decided to "put my hands on the dough" as Brazilians say.  I started by helping with
documentation.  André Carregal, the leader of Kepler, soon decided, however, that we should
use a wiki to manage the documentation.  There was no wiki written in Lua/Kepler written at
the time, so we looked at a few standard options, finding each lacking for one reason or
another.  I eventually lost patience and decided to try writing a simple wiki in Kepler.

So, on a Saturday afternoon in early April I sat down and some hours later the first version
of the wiki was ready.  Since the Brazilians about me emphasized my being Russian so much, I
called it "Sputnik."  That was my first experience programming in Lua, so it came out a bit
ugly, but it did run, and after a few bug fixes, we started using it as a wiki for the Kepler
project, and it was surprisingly well received.  One of the nice things about working in a
relatively small community is that you get noticed.  I doubt anyone would pay attention to
yet another wiki written in Python, but a wiki written in Lua brought it some attention early
on, more than I expected.  As a result, I almost immediately started a major refactoring effort,
spending more time than I care to admit since April.  I did manage to find time in between my
hacking session to collect data for my dissertation, but let's say that my "participant
observation" ended up being a lot more participant than is normal in ethnography.  (I am currently working on a methodological paper about participant observation and will post a link here later.)

The later iterations of Sputnik benefitted tremendously from discussions with André (oh, the
joys of face-to-face conversation) as well as contributions from other people, some "local"
at Rio, others remote.  Some submitted patches, others sent ideas, others reported bugs.
(See [[Credits]] for a partial list of names.)

In August 2007 I returned to the United States, to be able to focus on my writing my
dissertation, which is now my "day job."  I do end up spending a good amount of time on Sputnik,
which have forced me to hand off to someone else another project I used to lead.

Don't put anything here

About This Edit

Minor Edit

Edit Summary

Don't put anything here