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Acknowledgments This book could not have happened without the many people who have in various forms provided support, guidance, and inspiration. The book is based primarily on research done while pursuing a doctoral program at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am highly grateful to my many mentors there. From among those, Paul Duguid’s role stands out especially. Paul’s Social Life of Information introduced me to many of the questions that I explore in this book even before I formulated my graduate school plans. Paul’s arrival at the School of Information in 2004 was a true blessing. I feel especially thankful to Paul for his willingness to not just share his insights and knowledge, but also to invest so much time in half-incoherent drafts, helping me formulate my thoughts. I am also thankful to Peter Lyman, under whose supervision I started my program at Berkeley. I am grateful to Peter for convincing me to come to Berkeley, for introducing me to ethnography and social theory, and for securing funding for my research. He is and will be greatly missed. I am also tremendously indebted to other mentors who have inspired me with their own work and have put much time into helping me improve mine. Anno Saxenian’s work on transnational connections set an example for me from my early days at Berkeley and encouraged me to do international research. Anno’s advice over the years has also been invaluable. Peter Evans’s work introduced me to the history of Brazilian IT policy, and his continuous insistence on hearing “the point” of my work helped me sharpen my arguments. I also want to thank Coye Cheshire, Jean Lave, Suzanne Scotchmer, Michael Buckland, Nancy Van House, Ray Larson, Ted Egan, and Raka Ray for introducing me to many new ideas and providing suggestions for my work. Fellow students at Berkeley were also a source of inspiration and ideas. The diversity of their interests introduced me to a variety of ways of x Acknowledgments thinking about information technology, compensating for the narrow specialization inherent in a doctoral program. Jens Grossklags, Paul Laskowski, Joseph Hall, danah boyd, and Mahad Ibrahim helped me stay on track; they were a great cohort. I thank Dan Perkel, Megan Finn, Ryan Shaw, Christo Sims, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, and Bob Bell for attending numerous practice talks, providing suggestions, and being a great group to be around. Aaron Shaw and Michael Donovan, who were themselves working on Brazil, were a great source of insights about that country. Over one hundred people have generously volunteered their time to tell me about their lives and work. This book would not be possible without their courage to share their stories with a stranger. Many of those people also helped me feel at home in a new city. Some have become friends. Many of my interviewees have volunteered to read chapters of this book, finding factual errors, misinterpretations, inconsistencies, and often simply grammatical mistakes. I am particularly grateful to “Rodrigo” for his willingness to talk openly about the many challenges facing his project, for introducing me to many of the people on whose stories this book relies, and for tolerating my straddling of fieldwork and friendship. I thank Roberto Ierusalimschy and Luiz Henrique Figueiredo for our discussions about the past, present, and future of Lua, for their comments on drafts, as well as for their willingness to stand aside and let me present the story as I saw it. I thank the members of the Kepler team and Alta’s developers and managers for tolerating a resident ethnographer in their midst. Analysis of the interviews would be much harder without access to transcription . I thank Siobhan Hayes, Eva do Rego Barros, Rosa Paiva, Eliodora Besser, Patricia Martinez Alzueta, and Mariana Timponi for their work. I thank Marcelo Besser and LoGoS Traduções e Consultoria for organizing the process. Conversations with Brazilian scholars have helped me better understand the local context and Brazil’s history. I am particularly thankful to Paulo Tigre, Ivan da Costa Marques, Sidney Oliveira de Castro, Henrique Cukierman , Antonio Botelho, Nelson Senra, and Simon Schwartzman. I thank the Institute of Economics of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro for hosting me in 2005. After finishing my dissertation in May 2009, I moved to University of Toronto, where I benefited from support of colleagues and students. I am particularly thankful to Anthony Wensley for his efforts to bring me to Toronto and...

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