Data care and its politics:designing for local collective data management as a neglected thing

Abstract In this paper, we think with Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘matters of care’ about how to support data care and its politics. We use the notion to reflect on participatory design activities in two recent case studies of local collective data management in ecological research. We ask “How to design for data care?” and “How to account for the politics of data care in design?” Articulation of data care together with ethically and politically significant data issues in design, reveals in these cases the invisible labors of care by local data advocates and a ‘partnering designer’. With digital data work in the sciences increasing and data infrastructures for research under development at a variety of large scales, the local level is often considered merely a recipient of services rather than an active participant in design of data practices and infrastructures. We identify local collective data management as a ‘neglected thing’ in infrastructure planning and speculate on how things could be different in the data landscape

Little data, big data, no data?:data management in the era of research infrastructures. Workshop report

Introduction This workshop was organized to provide members and other stakeholders of INAR RI Ecosystems with an introduction to data management in the ecological and related sciences. The notion of local data management was used as a starting point to discuss data management activities taking place at or close to the origins of data, and to envision how data was coordinated within and across boundaries of a variety of related contexts. INAR RI Ecosystems is a consortium project funded by the Academy of Finland Research Infrastructure (FIRI) program 2017–2021. The aim of the project is to propose and consolidate an umbrella for environmental and ecosystem research infrastructures (RIs) in Finland (Bäck et al. 2017, ENVRIplus 2017). The consortium is led by University of Helsinki and composed of key ecosystem research components in Finland including Universities of Helsinki, Eastern Finland, Turku, Oulu, and Jyväskylä, as well as three national research institutes including Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE), Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), and Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). Figure 1 shows the INAR RI Ecosystems components and depicts which of the locations are ecosystem observation stations, experimental field stations, biological as well as ecophysiological laboratories, or co-locations of these. The aim of INAR RI Ecosystems is to 1) upgrade existing platforms and construct new platforms and data structures for analysing the functional relationships between ecosystems and the environment, 2) strengthen national ecosystem research and its linkages to atmospheric and environmental sciences, and 3) build a national scale, coordinated RI which enables the development and participation of Finnish partners in international RI initiatives such as ICOS, AnaEE and eLTER as well as data RIs such as EUDAT CDI and Lifewatch. Thus, INAR RI Ecosystems contributes as a national focal point for European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) RIs

Infrastructuring in PD:what does infrastructuring look like? when does it look like that?

Abstract In this hands-on workshop we invite the PD community to take stock of empirical insights and conceptual developments around the notions of infrastructure and infrastructuring. We propose that by leveraging the original relational nature of these concepts, we can revitalize the political soul of PD and better characterize the politics of participation in digitalization phenomena and processes ongoing in all walks of life. With a hands-on approach we will collectively and critically map, disentangle assumptions, identify blind spots and outline new research opportunities charting the possibilities and limitations of an infrastructuring approach in PD at large

Drawing together:infrastructuring and politics for participatory design

Introduction This e-zine documents the discussions and group work done at the ‘Infrastructuring in Participatory Design’ workshop, a full-day event that took place at the Participatory Design Conference 2018 in Hasselt and Genk, Belgium. Participants at the workshop came from a broad range of domains (e.g. Design, Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Information Sciences, Architecture), representing interests in infrastructuring from multiple perspectives. The workshop invited the Participatory Design (PD) community to come together, with their cases or projects, questions and topics of interest in order to take stock of empirical insights and conceptual developments around the notions of infrastructure and infrastructuring, and their relevance to the revitalization of the political agenda of PD. Following a hands-on approach, participants — collectively and critically — mapped issues, disentangled assumptions, identified blind spots, and outlined new research opportunities charting the possibilities and limitations of an infrastructuring approach in Participatory Design at large. Participants at the workshop came from a broad range of domains (e.g. Design, Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Information Sciences, Architecture), representing interests in infrastructuring from multiple perspectives. Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to 1) write a position statement and read everyone else’s position statements, 2) look at their own work in relation to the theme of the workshop to pick one artifact to bring to the workshop, 3) contribute to a collective compilation of research literature dealing with infrastructures and infrastructuring. With these activities, we together prepared issues, ideas, and concerns to work with in the workshop

Infrastructure Time: Long-term Matters in Collaborative Development

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