As a communication scholar I have been drawn to Winner’s thesis that confronting, working on, and talking about technology can make ethics visible and allow us to make different choices. It is a constant struggle of modernity to confront the idea that technology might be a quick fix. Civic hackathons are just such a site where technology is co-designed and choices made visible. Quite contrary to the idea that participants were unaware, awful ideas didn’t go unnoticed– in many cases they werevocally disputed.

Gil, who later became Brazil’s Minister of Culture, described tropicalismo as “No longer a mere submission to the forces of economic imperialism, but a cannibalistic response of swallowing what they gave us, processing it, and making it something new and different” (Dibbell, 1989: 78). Within this historical perspective, Gil’s ministry support for Open Source and Free Software takes on its full meaning.