as the integrity of those who inspect and assure standards are met and if it meets its higher order social goals - intersection / interplay between the social and material elements of an infrastructure. I have been thinking about checks and balances lately along with fulfilling higher goals. These are loosely structured into systems/infrastructures in un-obvious ways. This thinking solidified today after reading an article about concrete testers and standards inspectors on massive infratructural construction projects in the US being are under investigation for supplying fraudulent test results combined with a flippant comment on Radio Canada yesterday about the honour of performing in the Montreal Olympic Stadium before it gets torn down (less than 40 years after being built!) - recall the concrete scandals and scams!
For instance, Canada lacks of a cyberinfratructure and it does not have a digital data and information strategy. In this context, the geek talk would lead to the logical and rational conclusion that government records should be accessed via a distributed system and managed/preserved at their source. With this comes the latest infrastructural preservation - but really storage - proselytising of cloud computing. Why build a centralized trusted digital repository - aka - an archive for digital records and home based storage when you can rely on private sector grids and third party infrastructures?
Generally, it makes logical, rational and horizontal management sense to manage the preservation of records at the source. However, as an archivist friend rightly pointed out, government records need to be transfered to a centralized archive whose mandate is to preserve those same government records irrespective of their sensitive political content. This ensures that records maintain their integrity, authenticity, reliability and accuracy so that they can be refered to and scrutinized if there is an inquiry, audit, investigation or a scandal. If govenment records are stored at the source, the chances of the records surviving during trying times are significantly reduced - delete and disc wiping is a way to erase traces of wrongdoing, mismamagenent or faulty decision making. In a sense, the archive is democracy’s check and balance. As a practioner she had not thought of the archive in that way, however, as she explained the merits of distributed versus centralized this became obvious to us. I do not hear much talk of the higher order merits of archives these days, but I do hear of budget cuts and reduced acquisition of cultural knowledge. What happens, in the long term, however when we can no longer access important elements of our past?
As for cloud computing, if we reflect on the latest economic downturn, the location of these massive computer storage farms generally outside our jurisdiction, does it make sense to leave our precious national historical knowledge resources to large private sector companies whose long term futures are uncertain? Further, these are located behind borders beyond our jurisdiction, what checks and balances do we have to manage those data and information according to our laws and norms? If there is a calamity and the pipes that deliver those data break, but those pipes are not within our borders, how do we ensure those areprioritized for repairs if we cannot get access to the territory where they are located? Recall, part of the reason that Canada’s Radarsat 2 was not sold to a US arms manufacturer was precisely for those reasons, because, irrespective of whatever licenses and contracts are signed, where the data are piped to or where the Satellite is orbiting, US homeland security will overule all agreements if it deems there is a US securty risk. Also, what happens when a government invests in a private sector company like MDA to supply it with key national data, technology and information resources? The company may do as MDA did, it followed the directives of its shareholders and voided its loyalties to the nation and people that that funded it and negated national concerns for self interest.
This leads me to believe that a government, leaving its data storage to third party private sector companies outside or within its jurisdiction is irresponsible at best. Further, what of the cost of not learning to develop a sustainable infrastructure at home and in house with the necessary built in social and technical checks and balances?
When we think of infrastructure we tend to forget that these are physical manifestations of social constructs, and their materiality are embedded into and are part of important social, cultural, political and economic systems. The inexpesive technical solutions seem obvious and rational. At a different scale, the obvious technical solutions (decentralized distributed government record management and cloud computing) may be just plain irresponsible if the role of those systems are not considered. An national archive is a democracy’s check and balance. A cyberinfrastructure would need to orient its design to ensure that it can fulfill its democratic role and not default to technocratic immediacies. Or else, like the standards and concrete inspectors in Montreal or New York, who only see short term immediate personal gain instead of the social responsibility of ensuring public safety, trust in the built infrastructure and the integrity of the checks and balances of the system. These un-obvious concerns need to be inverted and what direct visioning execises if we are to work towards the creation of systems and infrastructures that will meet our long-term needs.
