Florence Millerand

Infrastructure Time: Long-term Matters in Collaborative Development

This paper addresses the collaborative development of information infrastructure for supporting data-rich scientific collaboration. Studying infrastructure development empirically not only in terms of spatial issues but also, and equally importantly, temporal ones, we illustrate how the long-term matters. Our case is about the collaborative development of a metadata standard for an ecological research domain. It is a complex example where standards are recognized as one element of infrastructure and standard-making efforts include integration of semantic work and software tools development. With a focus on the temporal scales of short-term and long-term, we analyze the practices and views of the main parties involved in the development of the standard. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) extension of the notion of infrastructure to more explicitly include the temporal dimension; 2) identification of two distinct temporal orientations in information infrastructure development work, namely ‘project time’ and ‘infrastructure time’, and 3) association of related development orientations, particularly ‘continuing design’ as a development orientation that recognizes ‘infrastructure time’. We conclude by highlighting the need to enrich understandings of temporality in CSCW, particularly towards longer time scales and more diversified temporal hybrids in collaborative infrastructure development. This work draws attention to the manifold ramifications that ‘infrastructure time’, as an example of more extended temporal scales, suggests for CSCW and e-Research infrastructures.

Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment

This article presents Information Infrastructure Studies, a research area that takes up some core issues in digital information and organization research. Infrastructure Studies simultaneously addresses the technical, social, and organizational aspects of the development, usage, and maintenance of infrastructures in local communities as well as global arenas. While infrastructure is understood as a broad category referring to a variety of pervasive, enabling network resources such as railroad lines, plumbing and pipes, electrical power plants and wires, this article focuses on information infrastructure, such as computational services and help desks, or federating activities such as scientific data repositories and archives spanning the multiple disciplines needed to address such issues as climate warming and the biodiversity crisis. These are elements associated with the internet and, frequently today, associated with cyberinfrastructure or e-science endeavors. We argue that a theoretical understanding of infrastructure provides the context for needed dialogue between design, use, and sustainability of internet-based infrastructure services. This article outlines a research area and outlines overarching themes of Infrastructure Studies. Part one of the paper presents definitions for infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure, reviewing salient previous work. Part two portrays key ideas from infrastructure studies (knowledge work, social and political values, new forms of sociality, etc.). In closing, the character of the field today is considered.

Who are the users? Who are the developers? Webs of users and developers in the development process of a technical standard

The paper presents an empirical study of user involvement in developing a technical standard for a scientific communitys information system project. The case illustrates how multiple perspectives are involved when considering the user role in practice. The case presents a situation where both developers and users were pre‐defined in the design and development phases of the standard as homogeneous groups of actors. Groups of actors changed to become more heterogeneous and ‘fluid’ in the deployment and implementation phases, thus forming ‘webs of developers’ and ‘webs of users’. Detailed analysis of the process in its entirety shows the blurredness of boundaries between ‘developer’ and ‘user’ categories and roles, and reveals challenges at social and organizational levels. Three models pertaining to the system development process are presented in order to illuminate differing perspectives on the user and on the development process itself. The paper draws theoretically from information systems, social informatics, and science and technology studies. The research contributes to a deeper, interdisciplinary understanding of ‘the’ user, of multiple roles in systems development, and of dynamic sets of user–developer relations.

Making an Issue out of a Standard: Storytelling Practices in a Scientific Community

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences.

Articulation Work Supporting Information Infrastructure Design: Coordination, Categorization, and Assessment in Practice

Articulation work is a critical factor in information infrastructure building projects that involve multiple and diverse communities. It brings awareness of language differences, ramifications of definition and use of categories, as well as other coordination mechanisms. Articulation work is of particular relevance to scientific endeavors that have broadened in the past decade to encompass global scale research and now require collaborative arrangements to handle complex interdependent elements. Our interdisciplinary research team joined with the long term ecological research (LTER) community of information managers recently to develop articulation work in selected activities. Through this partnership, initial activities and approaches in the articulation process are considered along with language and category uses pertinent to four main concepts (infrastructure, representation, design and mediation). Coordination mechanisms developed and employed over the last year as means for articulation work include dialogue mediation, co-design activities, and category elaboration in addition to traditional and emergent forms of assessment

Scientific Infrastructure Design: Information Environments and Knowledge Provinces

Conceptual models and design processes shape the practice of information infrastructure building in the sciences. We consider two distinct perspectives: (i) a cyber view of disintermediation where information technology enables data flow from the ‘field’ and on to the digital doorstep of the general end-user, and (ii) an intermediated view with bidirectional communications where local participants act as mediators within an information environment. Drawing from the literatures of information systems and science studies, we argue that differences in conceptual models have critical implications for users and their working environments. While the cyber view is receiving a lot of attention in current scientific efforts, highlighting the multiplicity of knowledge provinces with their respective worldviews opens up understandings of sociotechnical design processes and of knowledge work. The concept of a range of knowledge provinces enables description of dynamic configurations with shifting boundaries and supports planning for a diversity of arrangements across the digital landscape.

Interoperability strategies for scientific cyberinfrastructure: Research and practice

The development of new infrastructures for research and collaboration are occurring together with changes in expectations for scientific knowledge. New vocabularies and perspectives are developing with social and organizational practices of science changing concurrently but at different rates. Between the new infrastructures and the new perspectives, we are changing both how we know and what it is to know. A recently initiated three year project supported by the NSF Human Social Dynamics Program (Interoperability Strategies for Scientific Cyberinfrastructure: A Comparative Study) brings together work with three established research collaborations on large-scale information infrastructures in order to understand through comparative study particular configurations of technologies, communities, and organizations. Despite specific alignments of technical commitment, community involvement and organizational structure, all the projects fall under a common rubric of achieving for data interoperability.

« Tela Botanica » : une fertilisation croisée des amateurs et des experts

Nous chercherons ici a montrer comment le projet Tela Botanica permet a la fois une transformation et une actualisation du savoir botanique. Trois elements particuliers retiendront notre attention : la libre circulation et la mise a disposition des donnees les plus recentes du travail des botanistes ; l’articulation nouvelle entre le travail scientifique des amateurs et celui des professionnels ; la creation d’une forme organisationnelle hybride combinant des elements propres au milieu associatif et a l’entreprise privee. Nous utiliserons ces trois axes d’analyse tour a tour, en fournissant des exemples et des reflexions theoriques pour chacun.

‘Not your personal army!’ Investigating the organizing property of retributive vigilantism in a Reddit collective of websleuths

ABSTRACT This paper investigates a collective of websleuths called the Reddit Bureau of Investigation (RBI) that contains over 70,000 members. Websleuthing, or the investigative practices undertaken online by individuals who are not professional security providers, is an increasing trend. While conducting investigations on Reddit constitutes somewhat of a transgressive practice, the online platforms history is intimately linked with websleuthing since the manhunt that followed the 2013 Boston attacks which received much criticism from its community. Thus, we seek to understand how the RBI organizes its investigative activities against an anti-vigilante backdrop. Drawing from organizational discourse theory, we analyze the discursive practices developed by RBI members to define and enforce the collectives mission and participatory guidelines. Specifically, we focus on the figures (memes, metaphors, rules, affects, etc.) that RBI members invoke in interaction and on the role of Reddits affordances in the materialization of these discursive entities. Our analysis is threefold. First, we underline how figures associated with retributive vigilantism are invoked by moderators and their propension to circumscribe what (not) to do within the subreddit. Then, we analyze a series of controversial posts to identify the recurring discursive practices developed by users when asking the RBI for assistance. Finally, we explore the ambivalent rapport that RBI members maintain with the police. Overall, our analysis shows that members must overtly recognize police authority over criminal matters yet invoke the institutions limitations to justify their involvement in the RBI, all the while rejecting any association with retributive vigilantism.

When Medicine Is Becoming Collaborative: Social Networking Among Health-Care Professionals

In recent years, Wikis, blogs, microblogs, and other social networking platforms have become available to health care professionals facilitating information sharing and interprofessional collaboration. Online health-care provider communities act as “apomediaries” helping users seek, filter, and select relevant information. Interactions with professional peers on these platforms also provide opportunities for sharing, creating, and applying knowledge within their scope of practice. This chapter examines the use of web-based collaborative applications and social networking platforms by health professionals. Specifically, we outline the potential impacts on professional development, collaboration among health-care professionals, professional mentoring and support, and patient outcomes. We identify ways to address use barriers and outline potentials in fostering health-care professionals’ participation and engagement and conclude with future research directions.