serendipityoucity

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!