Studying the changing Mexican Internet Industry

I am a Mexican, and I am deeply interested in seeing the Internet industry in my country growing. I am also a Ph.D. student of the department of Informatics at UC Irvine.

I am doing my dissertation research about the changes that the Mexican Internet Industry is undergoing.

As a Mexican technologist, I am interested of the current changes of the industry because I want a cool Mexican Internet industry to work in once I finish. And instead to wait for it to happen, I also want to be part of the effort that many entrepreneurs, hackers, investors, public officials, and policy makers doing to advance the industry in Mexico.

As a researcher I am fascinated by the creativity of the people in this industry, and how these Mexicans are creating a series of social, technical and cultural infrastructures to create a change in the industry they work on.

I want to understand how this change is happening in practice, I want to provide a view from the trenches. For this I will go visit, observe and participate with the people creating this change in the companies that they work, the communities that they create, and the multiple spaces--online and offline-- were they talk.

The research strategy that I am following is participant observer, so I am at once an observer of the industry, and a participant of it. Being a participant really allows me to understand the practices that I am interested in reporting. I participate in multiple ways: I talk to people on twitter, post pictures on my Flickr or videos on my YouTube.

But my participation goes further. I am very proud of the group that is creating Hacker Garage, a hacker space in Guadalajara. We hope that Hacker Garage will be an innovation playground, were new start-ups emerge, and communities strive.

My blog is in English, because it is the language that I am using for my dissertation. Also, it is the language that is common for my audience. I guess that the discussion that hopefully it will generate will be in a mix of Spanish and English.