serendipityoucity

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!