Csíkszentmíhalyi, Christopher

Lyle, Peter

Sciannamblo, Mariacristina

Teli, Maurizio

English

    Aalborg UniversitetINFRASTRUCTURING THE COMMONS TODAY, WHEN STS MEETS ICTSSciannamblo, Mariacristina; Teli, Maurizio; Lyle, Peter; Csíkszentmíhalyi, ChristopherPublished in:Journal of Peer ProductionCreative Commons LicenseCC BY 4.0Publication date:2020Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordLink to publication from Aalborg UniversityCitation for published version (APA):Sciannamblo, M., Teli, M., Lyle, P., & Csíkszentmíhalyi, C. (2020). INFRASTRUCTURING THE COMMONSTODAY, WHEN STS MEETS ICTS. Journal of Peer Production, 14. http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-14-infrastructuring-the-commons-today-when-sts-meets-ict/editorial-note/General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            ? Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            ? You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            ? You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at vbn@aub.aau.dk providing details, and we will remove access tothe work immediately and investigate your claim.Downloaded from vbn.aau.dk on: December 25, 2020The Journal of Peer ProductionNew perspectives on the implications of peer production for social changeJournal of Peer Production Issue 14: Infrastructuring the commons today, when STSmeets ICThttp://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316© 2018 by the authors, available under a cc-by license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | 1EDITORIAL NOTESINFRASTRUCTURING THE COMMONSTODAY, WHEN STS MEETS ICTSby Mariacristina Sciannamblo, Maurizio Teli,Peter Lyle & Christopher CsíkszentmihályiThis special issue of the Journal of Peer Productioncollects a set of papers that address in differentways the relationship between Science andTechnology Studies (STS) and the field ofInformation and Communication Technologies(ICTs). The genealogy of this collection dates back tothe European Association for the Study of Scienceand Technology (EASST) Conference held inLancaster in July 2018. At that time, we (guesteditors of this special issue) responded to the call fortracks of the conference, whose overarching themerevolved around the word ‘meeting’. As typical ofSTS, the central topic of ‘meeting’ was unpackedacross multiple layers: aesthetic, epistemological,ethical, ontological, political. Therefore, theconference aimed to promote “generative mixingthrough meetings in all senses of this word: as apractical activity, a substantive topic, a politicalengagement and as theoretical exploration”.For us – people and researchers trained in differentand neighbouring fields such as sociology,participatory design, human-computer interaction,arts, and, of course, STS – this has sounded as acompelling input to effectively reflect upon theseveral meetings marking our research path,starting from our personal and professionalencounter in the remote Portuguese island ofMadeira, as well as from our mutual sense ofbelonging to and curiosity towards STS. As a result,we submitted a track proposal titled “STS meet ICT:politics and the collaborative turn in STS” to theEASST Conference, which received relevantfeedback in terms of proposals. In this respect, thehigh quality of research and discussions shared inLancaster has pushed us to pursue the intention tofollow up this work by assembling a larger reflectionfocused on the intersections among the topics andissues discussed at the EASST Conference, which,not with surprise, reflect some of our own researchinterests: infrastructuring, collaboration andparticipation, the politics of technology and design.Against this backdrop, we found the emergence ofthe so called “collaborative turn” in STS (Farías2017) an engaging and fruitful framework wherebyto develop a promising relation betweencollaborative forms of technological design and thepolitically-engaged character of STS (Sismondo2008). In a 2016 editorial note for the EASSTReview, Ignacio Farías discussed the widertransformations that STS might involve asintellectual practice. According to Farías, questionsconcerning ethical and political commitments ofthose researching around science and technologyhave become of interest for other disciplines (e.g.design, geography, architecture), contributing to animportant transformation for STS to expand itstheoretical grounds, analytical categories, andempirical sensibilities: “But what is now becomingapparent is again something different, namely, theconsolidation of a collaborative mode of practicingSTS involving committed action-research projectsbased on dialogue, mutual learning and caringrelationships within heterogeneous collectives”(Farías, 2016, p. 5, emphasis added). Such a“collaborative mode of practicing STS” has beennurtured by the increasing general prominence ofcritical approaches such as feminist and postcolonialperspectives as well as the meetings with moreThe Journal of Peer ProductionNew perspectives on the implications of peer production for social changeJournal of Peer Production Issue 14: Infrastructuring the commons today, when STSmeets ICThttp://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316© 2018 by the authors, available under a cc-by license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | 2applied fields such as participatory design,information science, and critical technical practice. As this special edition goes “to press” its editors arein lockdown because of the coronavirus, and thememory of a live international conference devotedto meetings seems very distant. Indeed, thelockdown has accelerated and reified the trend(especially for academics and other “knowledgeworkers”) toward work largely defined by mediatedelectronic communications, simply by removingalternatives. Software was already eating the world,but the global pandemic has sped up the digestiveprocess by pushing many more of our daily acts –from securing food to saying last goodbye to sickloved ones – onto ICT-based platforms. Theimportance of understanding how our societies arebuilding and in turn being affected by aninfrastructure of ICTs is even more urgent thanwhen we launched the call. In particular, as many countries face a novelsituation of having to conduct decorporealizedpolitics and elections, the interplay of politics andtechnical platforms – long a consideration of STS –takes center stage. Papers in this collection look atcivic and community engagements with the craftingof ICTs, including citizen science approaches andcommunity networks. Several papers explicitly detailthe tensions between the kind of formalizedrelationships that ICTs typically reify, i.e. through“roles” and monetary modeling, with relationships ofcommons and care. Bidwell, for example, warns thatcertain approaches to sustainability “promotemonetary metrics over more nuanced evaluations ofhuman connectivity,” and argues that emphasizingsocial coordination may help disentangle communitynetworks from capitalism. This work takes on a newkind of urgency now, as the global pandemictransitions to a global depression, the likes of whichwe may never have seen. How will we construct ICTsas a form of civic infrastructure which can help ustend to each other, our communities, and ourdemocracies?Our own work has been interested in the ways inwhich tools, practices and people cross the boundsof design and use, and understanding such aprocess as one of infrastructuring. Whereinfrastructuring is used to help understandcommoning activities has been part of our ownbackground – in particular with the recentCommonfare project – and thus part of ourmotivation for this special issue. For the submittedpapers, each contributes to different aspects of theconnection between these concepts, be they indifferent empirical contexts, in different workingsituations.Thus, with the question of infrastructuring thecommons as a background, we evoked thedisciplinary intersection of STS with design studiesand information science; the epistemologicalmeeting between STS and critical perspectives; themaking of new alliances between researchers,activists and local population; the convergence ofinstitutional interests and research practices topromote alternative sociotechnical infrastructures.This resulted in seven papers by nine differentauthors from a diversity of countries and institutionswhich have been included in this issue, after reviewsby a multitude of reviewers (thanks to all!) and tworounds of editing of the papers themselves. The richand multi-faceted special issue that has emerged inresponding to our call on “Infrastructuring theCommons today, when STS meets ICT” providestheoretical, empirical, and diverse contributions,reflecting a debate that is alive and productive.For example, Mirka Muilu revisits Hannah Arendt’sthinking, pointing to the philosopher’s materialismto discuss and question how we can think about therelationship between the production of thecommons and political action, providing a new lensto critique the concept of the tragedy of thecommons. With a different angle, Nic Bidwell takesthe example of community networks, infrastructuresfor connectivity managed at the local level, to pointto the contradictions between the local governanceand the monetary implications of mainstreamsustainability discourse. Adding further to theThe Journal of Peer ProductionNew perspectives on the implications of peer production for social changeJournal of Peer Production Issue 14: Infrastructuring the commons today, when STSmeets ICThttp://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316© 2018 by the authors, available under a cc-by license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | 3framing of the experiences of commoners, GiacomoPoderi interrogates the affective dimensions ofcommoning by drawing on feminist technoscience,depicting affect as a relational force movingbetween the bodies of the commoners. Both Bidwelland Poderi provide rich theoretical reflections butthey ground them on the lived experiences of thecommoners they work with, being them respectivelyin the ‘South’ or the ‘North’ of the world.The centrality of the empirical experience is evenmore visible in the following papers. Pablo Piquinelaand Gonzalo Correa discuss the construction of atent of the Uruguayan Solidarity Economy Network(USEN) and, in doing so, they adopt the concept of‘cosmogram’ to account for the inextricable relationbetween commoning practices and the human andnon-human entities that make them up. IleanaApostol and Panos Antoniadis bring the empiricalinvestigation even further, describing a case ofparticipatory design of a new urban space in Zurich,Switzerland, considered as a commons since itsconceptualization. Rodolfo Hernand-Pérez focuseson the production of scientific knowledge as acommons, taking the case of citizen science in Chinaas the object of his investigation. Finally, AndreaGaspar helps us going recursively further, focusingon the professional figure of the interactiondesigner, the ones who have a crucial skill set indesigning the infrastructures we rely upon ascommons, and she discusses the working conditionsof interactions designers in the light of their requiredflexibility – being both flexibility to adjust to thewicked problems of design and the precarity ofunstable working conditions. The papers included in this special issue revolvearound and expand the word ‘meeting’ that hasgenerated this collection, allowing us to realize thatour “things” (being them concepts, methods, as wellas the very mundane tools through which we makea living) can be themselves practical experiences ofcommoning and political engagement. Thinking withLeigh Star, the papers we present offer an angle ofvision according to which the relations of people-things-technologies can be considered not only asan object naturalized in one centered world (such asthe objects of Western science), but mainly as“heralds of other worlds, and of a wildness that canoffset our naturalizations in liberatory ways” (Star,1994).ACKNOWLEDGMENTThis special issue would not have been possiblewithout the voluntary work of the reviewers. Wewant to thank all of them, Mako Hill, LiesbethHuybrechts, Stefania Milan, Midas Nouwens, LindaTonolli, as well as the ones who have preferred toremain anonymous.This project has received funding from the EuropeanResearch Council (ERC) under the European Union’sHorizon 2020 research and innovation programme(grant agreement No 740548).REFERENCESFarias, I. (2016) A collaborative turn in STS? EASSTReview, 35(3), 4-5.Star, S. L. (1994). Misplaced Concretism andConcrete Situations: Feminism, Method andInformation Technology, presented at the Gender,Culture. In Nature Workshop at Århus University,Århus, Denmark. Republished in Bowker, G. C.,Timmermans, S., Clarke, A. E., & Balka, E. (Eds.).(2016). Boundary objects and beyond: Working withLeigh Star, pp. 143–167. MIT Press

INFRASTRUCTURING THE COMMONS TODAY, WHEN STS MEETS ICTS

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INFRASTRUCTURING THE COMMONS TODAY, WHEN STS MEETS ICTS

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