serendipityoucity

Via: Heather McAdam
Chair, ACMLA Map Users’ Advisory Committee

Until February 28th, the Ministry of Finance is calling for input on its budget priorities. As with the campaign for the print topographic maps last fall, it is important to make our politicians aware that it is necessary to keep topographic maps of Canada up-to-date.

Input into the government’s budget priorities is an important step to raise the awareness of mapping. If you agree please submit 50 words or less to the Ministry of Finance’s online pre-budget consultations, in the priority category: Other.

Sample statement:

The Government of Canada must ensure complete and up-to-date topographic maps of Canada by Natural Resources Canada to: defend our sovereignty and security in the face of global realities, support our search and rescue teams, monitor Canada’s environmental and natural resources base.

Link to a Min. Finance Response Area - http://www.mapsforcanadians.ca/budget.htm

Link to a Template letter - http://www.mapsforcanadians.ca/letter.htm 

See much more here -  www.mapsforcanadians.ca for more information.

I am still working with the following Cyberinfrastructure report.

But as i re-read where i left off, i recalled concepts such as convergence, intelligent infrastructures and web 3.0.  There was lots of cross over.  Also, elements of intelligent infrastructure look like indicators of ‘infrastructureness’ (Michael’s word) such as:

interoperability, scalability, adaptability, reliability, visibility and security.

Coincidently the Intelligent Infrastructure paper considered signaling system 7 (SS7) and the domain name system (DNS) as intelligent infrastructure examples which leads me to believe that email, and excel spreadsheets would also fall into that category.  The former because it is now a ubiquitous part of any communication infrastructure irrespective of the type of user application and the later because it is so well used across many disciplines.  Does widespread use make something a defacto element of an infrastructure or a characteristic of infrastructureness?

Michael may also be right (he often is i just hate to immediately admit it!) that virtual infrastructure is not a very good concept particularly when reflecting about convergence and predecessor infrastructures.  However, the term second order infrastructure still makes sense with regards to characterizing community wireless infrastructures (Alison liked that concept to!).

I thought about the definitions of geospatial data infrastructures (GDIs) which are a collection of policies, standards, technologies, people, applications, institutional arrangements and organizations at any scale to collect, manage, maintain and disseminate geospatial data.  Are cyberinfrastructures any different?

cyberinfrastructure is the set of organizational practices, technical infrastructure and social norms that collectively provide for the smooth operation of scientific work at a distance. (p.6)

Their application areas differ but not heir definitions substantively.  The discussion of standards in the Cyberinfrastructure report is also very reminiscent of GDI standards work.  What of community wireless infrastructures?  Spectrum Standards?

In Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape infrastructure is considered to be part of

the technological fabric of society (p.2)

the hardware that goes into making a civilization (p.5).

the industriosphere 

Hayes focuses primarily on the technological and physical artifacts of infrastructure and less the social, nonetheless i like his definitions.

Back to the Infrastructure report. Path dependence and infrastructural determinism in my mind are highly associated.  Path dependences are those locked in technologies, sometimes even inferior technologies that are hard to move out of.  Path dependent technologies become so dominant, that they cannot be upseated even if a better technology comes forward, as there are significant hardware, software and peopleware investments.  Some of the issues associated with this are:

• Localized learning: "individuals and organizations satisfice rather than optimize" (p.17) and once technological choices have been made and invested in adaptation occurs which creates resistance to change.
• Irreversability: "beyond some tipping point of widespread adoption, choosing an alternative to the dominant system becomes to costly" (p.17) in money, time, attention, retraining and coordination.
• Network effects: "the value of certain kinds of technology increases exponentially with widespread adoption" (p.17).  This is also associated with wide adoption  and indispensability.
• Inefficiency

The authors caution that

technological change is always path dependent in the sense that it builds on, and takes for granted, what has gone before.  Today’s choices constrain tomorrow’s possibilities.  Yet they also create new possibilities, i.e. directions that could not have been taken in the absence of  technology x (p.17-18).

Therefore there is both positive and negative path dependence.

The report discusses scale.  From small, local and specific infrastructures that move into large fully functioning infrastructures. They refer to the long time frames the diffusion of innovation theories for a variety of infrastructures.  But not in enough depth for my liking! Particularly since scalability is really important when deciding on gateway technologies.

The report also discusses the invisible tensions that occur behind the scenes and rarely appear in the performativity of the actual operating infrastructures.  As the author’s put it, what seems inevitable as a technological path or implementation has occurred through a series of debates that users do not see nor can they conceive of.  Particularly in the case of ‘achieved’ infrastructures. When infrastructures are forming numerous tensions emerge amongst actors and as Schumpeter would say - there is allot of ‘creative destruction’ resulting in both winners and losers.

Infrastructures, especially those in the making, are what political scientists term agonistic phenomena: imagined, produced, refined, and occasionally reassessed in a stratified and deeply conflictual field (p.24).

as practices, organizations, norms, expectations, and individual biographies and career trajectories bend - or don’t - to accommodate, take advantage of, and in some cases simply survive the new possibilities and challenges posed by infrastructure (p.24).

Some of the issues associated with these tensions are:

• Interest and exclusion:  some positions, programs, cities, life in general are enhanced by a particular infrastructure development.  Alternatively, some jobs become obsolete, the negative effects of being bypassed by a particular infrastructure (road, fibre), sidetracking some disciplines by new funding preferences, or further marginalization by some groups by the fast pace change in a particular infrastructure they are not even a part of.

Emergent infrastructures function as redistribution mechanisms, reorganizing resource flows across scales ranging from the local workplace or research laboratory to the global economy.  Few if any are free from distributional consequences altogether (p.24).

Disregarding this effect is bad planning, bad politics and bad business and i would add un-neighbourly!

Doreen Massey, a well know cultural geographer coined the term ‘power geometries’ of infrastructure, while Leigh Star refers to infrastructure ‘orphans’.  The term ‘consequential infrastructure’ is also discussed but not defined.

When discussing power, exclusion and path dependence the report refers to the concept of capture:

the interests of powerful established constituencies come to overwhelm and crowd out potential innovations.  Infrastructural incumbents may exploit their historically-accrued strengths to effectively hold infrastructure in place, stacking the decks against new, less organized, or less favorably placed actors, thereby limiting the scope and vision of new infrastructure possibilities (p.26).

Today i went to an urban planning consultation event, and the workshops were by invitation only.  The rest of the people who attended got to look at maps and provide input to officials at the event.  There was also an absence of those most familiar of Wellington street, namely, the established francophone population, those who live in social housing, the hookers, druggies and the homeless.  The demographics at the consultation were also primarily white in this very ethnically and racially diverse part of town.  The process will be trapped and captured by the needs and interests of those easy to deal with, who are sophisticated and versed in the process while the more messy elements, linguistically diverse, and urban nomads who know the hood better than anyone will simply have to live with what comes down the pipe.

In the case of community communication infrastructures, it becomes important to question these social dynamics as well.  Who is at the table and who is not?  Whose agendas?  How exclusive are the meetings and think tanks?  What are the demographics? Do they matter?  What is the social and political agenda?  Who gains and who loses? What are the main tensions - open source vs ms? Exclusively free or a combination of free and not? Mesh vs hotspots? Municipal or private or public? Neutrality? Who are the community wireless infrastructuralists?  Should they dominate?  Where and who are the checks and balances to evaluate the pros and cons of a path dependencies? Is it only the system builders who have a say?  Like the great man theories of scientific advances?  What of unmitigated entitlement?  The report suggests:

Finding ways to translate between such design-level perspectives and the more "pedestrian" experience of infrastructure - and to continually incorporate lessons learned "below" into the next round of design from ‘above" (p.28).

Moving from the god view and the pedestrian is no easy task! Tension is what most of us try avoid, however in the case of infrastructures, it is suggested that these should be embraced, they may be leveraged and contribute to a better infrastructure avoiding "edifice complex" which is the

the tendency to build first and ask questions later, or to treat the technical "code and wires" core as the realest or most essential thing about infrastructure, and the rest as social add-on - that has too frequently defined and limited the work of infrastructural development (p.29).

The report looks at ownership and investment models.  This was a light review where public, private a combination thereof, centralized, decentralized or formalized and distributed were alluded to. 

The OSI layers were discussed and the authors pointed out that only computer users and designers appear within them and suggest that the social elements appear at each layer.  I disagree, and think that we should still promote layer 8 - the social layer!

I still need to put all of this stuff together!  But conclude that infrastructure is not socially benign, and what and how they are created will determine how we interact with them to some extent, alternatively their technological and social path dependencies especially as infrastructures converge and their components consolidate.  Community wireless infrastructures provide an opportunity to learn by doing infrastructure and they too will be interconnected, at the moment the glue is social, eventually it may be technical.  It will be interesting to see what gateway technologies get developed and how these second order infrastructures will look like when they become achieved and who will take part in imagining these and what the tensions will be.

War Corporatism: The New Fascism

From Information Aesthetics and  Information Clearing House.

A video by Simon Robson - Knife Party and Barry McNamara. It’s an animated look at the dogs of War Corporatism unleashed upon the world by Bush and the PNAC as stated in the September 2000 document Rebuilding America’s Defenses.

joined

 

with  

and PODCO at the Hintonburg Community Centre today as part of a City of Ottawa neighbourhood planning exercise.

Check out the photos!
Read a list report! 

I decided at the last minute to go to the Kingston Royal Military College Judo Tournament over the weeked.  And well I came back with a medal!  Silver! Ok! So there were only two of us in our category.  I fought in two matches against the ever so wonderful Valerie, who beat me about two years ago.  The medal as you know, is of questionable merit under the circumstances, however the Yuko was incredible!  I mean i got a point!  Not an ippon but the next best thing! So i am making progress!  I had a few teenagers smiling & giggling with/at me uncomfortably when i told them that in the next tournament my objective is to score 2 points!

 

in continuation of last night’s learning!

Ok! So now we get into dynamics according to the report:

• as infrastructures mature they become ubiquitous, accessible, reliable and transparent
• also, there are stages in their evolution

1. System Building - characterized by the deliberate and successful design of technology based services
2. Technology Transfer - across domains and locations yielding variations on the original design (organizationally, culturally, technologically) and the emergence of competing systems
3. Consolidation - infrastructures form when the various systems merge into networks or internetworks often characterized by gateways which allow dissimilar systems to be linked.  Critical decisions are required as early choices constrain future ones and become path dependent.  Sometimes there is one winner that takes all or there are gateways to enable interoperability.  These are things like AC/DC converters, platform independent software, languages and presentation formats and networks such as power grids or the internet.  Consolidation is considered complete when users consider the infrastructure to be a commodity resource undifferentiated like telephone switching or IP connectivity.  Or as i would normally say, when the service’s complex technologies operate seamlessly and are invisible to the user.  Transnational linking of tunnels, trains, phones, undersea fibre optic cables also require the resolution of legal, financial and technical standards simultaneously and also they alter the nature of boundaries between cultures and national sovereignty.
   

True infrastructures only begin to form when locally constructed, centrally controlled systems are linked into networks and internetworks governed by distributed control and coordination processes.  Second, infrastructure formation typically starts with technology transfer from one location or domain to another; adapting a system to new conditions introduces technical variations as well as social, cultural, organization, legal, and financial adjustment.  Third, infrastructures are consolidated by means of gateways that permit the linking of heterogeneous systems into networks. (p.7)

So community communication infrastructures are undergoing the technology transfer phase but have not yet been consolidated by means of gateways.  A question i typically get asked in a developing country context is scalability; if a rural and remote area in Afghanistan gets a community wireless infrastructure as does a village 10km down the mountain path can they be connected?   I was told that for the moment, no.  But i still find that hard to believe! Also what works for 1000 users may not work for 100 000. 

• Three concepts emerge in the case of infrastructure development processes according to this report:

1. Reverse salience - critical unsolved problems both technical and organizational or social, that emerge during the networking/internetworking phase.
   
2. Gateways - technologies and standards that can be applied across multiple communities of practice.  Generic and meta-generic gateways, in lieu of dedicated and improvised gateways used in systems.
   
3. Path dependency - as groups and individuals rely on infrastructures, they adapt to them and tie in numerous small scale and local elements to the larger service which can be positive and negative.

The report notes that once infrastructures are established they are very hard to change, thus early decisions are very important. This is the reason why i find public input into these large complex social and technical artifacts really important, and this was also stressed on Feb. 6th in Ottawa at the Net Neutrality talk.  We can influence infrastructures in their different phases once we know how and when to do so.

The report also discusses something i have been talking about for a while, namely expert chauvinism regarding non experts and users. 

the development process builds expertise among developers; as a result, developers can lose their ability to see how novices, or users in a different field, perceive and use their systems.  Information Technology projects frequently founder when they attempt to transition rapidly from a small, close-knit developer community to a larger, more diverse community of novice users. (p.10)

users will take things into their own hands and wreak havoc on what the developers had in mind, they will create new divergent norms, practices, and standard implementations.

Consolidation discussed earlier is also very much tied to ownership.  According to the report, in the "modern infrastructural ideal" era between 1850-1975 universal service was provided by a single provider, mostly a national government - think of rail, telephone, post and roads.  If infrastructural services were private they tended to be in monopolistic entities or public utilities that were regulated by the state (electric, gaz, sewers, etc.).  If there was competition it was controlled under a legal framework such as in the case of air and rail transport.

Today we now have splintering (concept from Graham and Marvin) of the infrastructures where monopolies are breaking down and public utilities are being sold off to the private sector.  So we move from consolidation to splintering caused by deregulation, market approaches and a reduced degree of public oversight.

Increased capacity for decentralized coordination (as opposed to centralized control) enabled a retreat from the logic of vertical integration. (p.11).

There is a part of me that is weary of this and another that is comforted by it.  The ice storm, the  Red River flood, Katrina and the South Asian Tsunami all had problems related to a lack of centralization.  Who decides and who and where is the hub for all.  The Net Neutrality talk discussed the concentration of broadband ownership in Canada being primarily in the hands of two corporations.  Further, people who travel in the US frequently note that individually owned private state cell phone companies are not necessarily interested in interoperating in their catchment areas.  Alternatively there is a reduction in the concentration of power. The report notes that splintering also means

service tiering, with wealthy customers and heavy users receiving premium, highly reliable services, while poor people and infrequent users must rely on low-grade services or be excluded altogether - an issue being revisited today under the broad rubric of Internet neutrality (p.11).

Now this is where things get really interesting.  Growth, consolidation and splintering are related to historical models of large technical systems and indicate a change from

homogeneous, centrally controlled, often geographically local systems to heterogeneous, widely distributed networks in which central control may be partially or wholly replaced by coordination.

…infrastructures are not systems.  Instead, they are networks or webs that enable locally controlled and maintained systems to interoperate more or less seamlessly.  It is typically only in the consolidation phase, with the appearance of standardized, generic gateways, that most large technical systems become genuine infrastructures, i.e. ubiquitous, reliable, and widely shared resources operating on national and transnational, scales.  Thus we define a spectrum running from systems (centrally organized and controlled) to networks (linked systems with partially or wholly distributed among nodes) to webs (networks of networks based primarily on coordination rather than control). (p. 11-12)

This and the table on page 12 of the report have been really helpful since I have had tremendous difficulty in distinguishing a system, from a network from an infrastructure.  To go back to community wireless groups, it would seem that at this stage they are a series of local systems that are loosely networked by a large number of national and transnational actors who share knowledge and expertise on a variety of legal, economic, regulatory and technical issues.  In addition they also share software but these software and firmware are only linked into local systems irrespective of whether or not they are a mesh or a hotspot model.  The local community wireless groups are not seamlessly interconnected with each other.  They may be second order large technological systems or virtual infrastructures. Which reminds me that i need to go back and take a look at second order cybernetics.

The concept of a virtual infrastructure or second order large technological systems discussed in the report applies to email, www or cellular phones. These services are built upon and depend on another infrastructure, email and the WWW on the Internet while the cell phones follow in the trajectory of electrical power or the rail system.  The cell phone system which is intricately interconnected with the land line system can also be called a second order large technological system. And so on.  Community wireless initiatives i think fall more closely into those categories.

the explosive growth experienced by all three of these recent infrastructures would not have occurred without the slower growth of the older infrastructures that underlie them. (p.14)

Together with the splintering phenomenon described above, our increasing capacity to build virtual infrastructures and second order large technical systems using coordination mechanisms is important background to cyberinfrastructure formation.  These phenomena have created a paradigm of increasingly articulated, fragmented and tiered service delivery, across all infrastructures. (p.14).

Again, the information i was exposed to at the Net Neutrality talk is beginning to mean something.  The expression two tiered internet it was suggested, might stick more in Canada than net neutrality which has social stickiness in the states.  I stared blankly and giggled to fit in with the crowd as i did not really get it, but alas, it is starting to sink in! The real tricky part however, is the manufactured and real poor state of the public health system which has created some buyin’ for a two tiered health care system, this is the same argument of parents who send their kids to private and prep schools use for not sending their kids into the crumbling public school system.  In other words, people may very well embrace the idea of a two tiered internet as they see it less as a public infrastructure and more as a private good where the highest bidder should get what they paid for.  When the systems went down in Taiwan, Japan, India, and China recently only the big kids such as banks, and big corporations had their traffic re-routed while household users and the cafes were left without service!

Along with all the electronic waste issues associated with the information economy now there is the energy cost of running the servers and keeping them cool! 

I luved all the hype over the years with space distanciation theory, and how geography is disappearing with the internet, the meat space of the planet is disapearing.  In reality though, the  Internet is very real and intertwined with the planet, think of all those trenches for all those cables, manholes, undersea cables, all those towers, all those hubs, switching stations, antennas and space satellites, and of course the environmental cost of trashing and maintaining and manufacturing all that stuff! 

And the tagline was the computer revolution is good for the environment as it will bring us the paperless office! Ironic!

read:

Data Centers’ Growing Power Demands
A new report quantifies the electricity consumption of servers, revealing a startling trend.
By Kate Greene, MIT Technology Review

The report is:

Calculating Total Power Requirements for Data Centres by Richard Sawyer from American Power Conversion (APC).

It is also interesting to think how concentrated all that stuff is.  And the what if scenarios around a natural disaster or worse.  An earthquake brought down the internet in Asia for weeks just recently! Our economies and lives are so dependent on these technologies that we have barely noticed this until of course the infrastructures break down.

This post on the ecological footprint of a cheezeburger comes to mind and i wonder what the actual footprint is of downloading a google map and what the full production cycle would be.  Or any other data service for that matter.

Public Reason is a concept i just came across.  I do not really have a handle on it yet.

I came across it here in a Study of Public Reasoning while reading up on the social science work going into the construction of the Cyberinfrastructure.

And while digging for more i came across this explanation of public reason in a Legal Theory blog.

I also found this abstract which is intriguing - Reconstructing Public Reason.

I think, but not completely sure yet, it can be a useful concept for civicaccess.ca in that public reasoning requires data and also for a way to encourage public debate in the construction of infrastructures as in large technological system need public reason for their construction and public reasoning in how they are constructed.  The term also seems to show up in mediations of democracy and pluralism.

I also think it ties in with collectivist understandings of territory and nation, not the essentialist ones, but the fabricated, manufactured and imagined ones.

Just finished reading this excellent report History and Theory of Infrastructure Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructure Funded by the National Science Foundation in the US.

And I think i am finally getting back on track!

• Infrastructural development involves much contingency, uncertainty and historical specificity
• while heterogeneous they have shared patterns, processes and emergent lessons that span across the time and types of infrastructure construction when historically and socially compared
• Infrastructures build on previous bodies of knowledge and doing, in the case of the cyberinfrastructure in question, it emerged from both practice and technology: the growth in the practice of doing statistics, taking a census, the growth of counting or information gathering by the state; also the growth of knowledge workers - encyclopedist coupled with the technological and organizational capabilities to sort, sift and store information.
• The information society thus builds on the long history of large scale production systems - industrial/control revolution, the punch card reader came from a previous technologies knows as carbon paper and manila envelopes which provided organizational context to support the need of the punch card, that all came before computing.
• Bref - there are no innovations that do not have a pre-existing context, technologies are not ahistorical products

organizations are (in part) information processors.  People, routines, forms, and classification systems are as integral to information handling as computers, Ethernet cables and Web protocols.

•  The history of letters between scientists, conferences supported by new transportation systems and journals developed as Anderson in Imagined Communities might say simultaneity in thinking, where a scientific community emerges aided by the lingua franca of English and French.  These were the evolutions of scientific collaborations.
• Cyberinfrastructures, like all infrastructures i would argue, "include hardware, software, personnel services and organizations" (Atkins Report p. 13).

in building cyberinfrastructure, the key question is not whether this is a "social" problem or a "technical" one.  That is putting it the wrong way around.  The question is whether we choose, for any given problem, a social or a technical solution or some combination.  It is the distribution of solutions that is the object of study. (p.6)

therefore

cyberinfrastructure is the set of organizational practices, technical infrastructure and social norms that collectively provide for the smooth operation of scientific work at a distance. (p.6)

these are intricately tied to engineering and design, and if ignored the infrastructure will fail. 

the eventual growth of complex infrastructure and the forms it takes are the result of converging histories, path dependencies, serendipity, innovation, and "bricolage" (tinkering). (p. 6-7).

• the concept of harnessing complexity becomes important since infrastructures are large and complex

Infrastructure is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally.  Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above.  Changes take time and negotiation, and adjustment with other aspects of the systems involved. (Star and Ruhleders in report p.7).

If that is not beautiful enough, particularly when thinking of community communication infrastructures, the report adopts the following approach:

Since infrastructures are incremental and modular, they are always constructed in many places (the local), combined and recombined (the modular), and they take on new meaning in both different times and spaces (the contextual).  Better then to deploy a vocabulary of growing, fostering or encouraging in the evolutionary sense when analyzing cyberinfrastructures (p.7).

Dang! I think this is also true for community communication infrastructures, the language this report proposes also reminds me very much of what i see in how Michael envisages Ile Sans Fil in Montreal.  In the many conversations i have shared with him, i always get the sense that he is intimately engaged in thinking, conceptualizing, reflecting and nurturing the infrastructures he and the ISF gang have participated in creating in Montreal and supporting or collaborating with in Quebec, Ottawa-Gatineau and Toronto.

I will have to come back and finish this tomorrow! Til then!

In honour of Valentines Day I am sharing some chocolate delights with you!

First a bouquet!

 

These are for:

 

Ladies and gents! Some of these very anatomically correct chocolates will be sold at the event!  In case your wondering yours truly here will be in the March 3 show!

 

I know you want one!