Designing e-infrastructure is work conducted today with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Participants in such development projects find themselves caught with one foot in the demands of the present and the other in a desired future. In this paper we seek to capture participants' formulation of problems as they go about developing long-term information infrastructure.Drawing from cross-case ethnographic studies of four US e-infrastructure projects for the earth and environmental sciences (cyberinfrastructure), we trace nine tensions as they are framed and articulated by participants. To assist in understanding participants' orientations we abstract three concerns -motivating contribution, aligning end goals, and designing for use -which manifest themselves uniquely at each of the 'scales of infrastructure': institutionalization, the organization of work, and enacting technology. The concept of "the long now" helps us understand that participants seek to simultaneously address all three concerns in long-term development endeavors.
Like many professional work activities in this age of ubiquitous computing and high-speed internet connections, computer programming and software development are increasingly mediated by systems with 'social media' features like profiles, avatars, 'liking', and commenting capabilities. When working on shared tasks, programmers have effectively leveraged these capabilities to overcome differences in time and location while simultaneously using collaborative web applications, such as version control repositories like SCM or 'git' systems to work together more efficiently. Here we present preliminary findings from a project investigating patterns of collaboration on the social coding platform Github. We've used a research method that combines the use of statistical approaches from social network analysis (SNA) and traditional qualitative case study construction. Our results show that this method is useful in qualitatively explaining the topology of a collaborative network, especially the formation of cliques that have been identified using traditional SNA metrics.
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