Infrastructure Time: Long-term Matters in Collaborative Development

Abstract

Abstract. This paper addresses the collaborative development of information infrastructure for supporting data-rich scientific collaboration. Studying infrastructure development empirically not only in terms of spatial issues but also, and equally importantly, temporal ones, we illustrate how the long-term matters. Our case is about the collaborative development of a metadata standard for an ecological research domain. It is a complex example where standards are recognized as one element of infrastructure and standard-making efforts include integration of semantic work and software tools development. With a focus on the temporal scales of short-term and long-term, we analyze the practices and views of the main parties involved in the development of the standard. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) extension of the notion of infrastructure to more explicitly include the temporal dimension; 2) identification of two distinct temporal orientations in information infrastructure development work, namely 'project time' and 'infrastructure time', and 3) association of related development orientations, particularly 'continuing design' as a development orientation that recognizes 'infrastructure time'. We conclude by highlighting the need to enrich understandings of temporality in CSCW, particularly towards longer time scales and more diversified temporal hybrids in collaborative infrastructure development. This work draws attention to the manifold ramifications that 'infrastructure time', as an example of more extended temporal scales, suggests for CSCW and e-Research infrastructures.

From Artefacts to Infrastructures

“…Longitudinal ('biography') perspectives of collaborative technology are scant (Karasti et al 2010). Temporal framing is important because current research designs tend to be relatively short term compared to the extended timeframes involved in technological developments, which are often not confined to one short period (such as the initial development phase) but can extend across years and even decades.…”

Information Infrastructures and the Challenge of the Installed Base

“…'building' or 'constructing') since it gives a "sense of an organic unfolding within an existing (and changing) environment" where there is a "recurring issue of adjustment in which infrastructures adapt to, reshape, or even internalize elements of their environment in the process of growth and entrenchment" (Edwards et al 2007, p. 369). These processes of infrastructure evolution happen along multiple temporal scales (Edwards et al 2009;Ribes and Finholt 2009;Karasti et al 2010). In this perspective, we approach the cases by paying attention to the strategies enacted in order to deal with the installed base, and examine how developing infrastructures entails engagement in processes of extension, recombination, substitution of parts and arrangements that already exist.…”

“…Taking an infrastructural perspective reorients our attention to interconnections and relationships as well as to issues of durability and permanence. The challenge is then to devise strategies for effectively managing future evolution (Ribes and Finholt 2009;Karasti et al 2010). The installed base is both enabling and constraining infrastructure evolution (Hanseth et al 1996;Hanseth and Aanestad 2003), it can be "a resource for creative design and innovation or a trap from which it is difficult to escape" (Lanzara 2014 p. 19).…”

Introduction

“…Working with infrastructures within healthcare is especially challenging because novelty has to link to complex conventions of practice and to technologically congested landscapes that have gradually matured during several decades. Taking an infrastructural perspective does not only orient attention to interconnections and relationships but also to issues of durability, permanence and strategies for effectively managing future evolution (Ribes and Finholt 2009;Karasti et al 2010).…”