Human infrastructure - build it bottom-up

An article by Procter et al "Fostering the human infrastructure of e-research" (2013, restricted access) discusses the challenges of embedding computing resources and systems into research. E-infrastructures (aka cyberinfrastructures in the US) are defined as digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) that can provide fast and scalable access to remote resources and increase discovery and innovation. Human infrastructure is arrangements of actors and organizations that make computer-research systems work. It is often acknowledged that human infrastructure is neglected compared to the investments in the technical infrastructure. And that's where the problem is. Cyberinfrastructures don't work without human adoption and use. As authors of the article state:

"So far, despite substantial investment, the desired transformative impact has yet to be achieved."

The article describes the Enabling Wider Uptake of e-Infrastructure Services project (ENGAGE/e-Uptake) that was designed to identify inhibitors and enablers of the adoption of e-Infrastructure services. The identification is based on interviews with ~50 researchers from higher education institutions and ~50 "intermediaries", or technical specialists who support researchers in their use of ICTs.

Findings

Obstacles in e-Infrastructure adoption and use:

• Lack of training - many researchers hear about research computing services, but they often don't know about the nature of the services and the benefits of using them.
• Lack of local research support - support is often basic, limited, fragmented and difficult to access.
• Poor project management - projects that involve technical and research personnel have their own managing needs, i.e., the need to manage collaborations between people with their own research agendas and temporarily aligned interests. Managers who don't have such skills may make biased decisions and favor one type of team members over others.

Conclusions

• There is complexity in divisions of labor and in organizational structures that may be historical. In cyberinfrastructure projects we may need more flexible and flatter approaches.
• More teaching and training is needed - not only teaching of e-Research methods in classes, but also lifecycle outreach from the collaborative formation of projects through the acquisition of skills and the appropriation of technologies to the dissemination of experiences back into the community (see, for example, eIUS project for a collection of use cases and tools used in them).
• User engagement can take a form of relying on "hybrids", i.e., people with both technical and domain expertise, or a form of co-locating technical experts and users throughout projects. More research is needed into how to do that plus how to leverage community engagement.
• New practices must be embraced not only by researchers, but by the organizations within which researchers work.

The article reinforces the idea that by default software and computing tools are hard to learn and use. Why is that? A common argument is that complex problems require complex solutions. Doesn't a simple fix sometimes work better? Or, perhaps, it's ok to have complex solutions, but they arise from a number of simple solutions combined and overlapped. I wonder whether we should start with building simple local systems ("recognized routes" or local roads) rather than large and multi-purpose systems (interstate highways, to continue the infrastructure metaphor). Once local needs are met and served well, we can move into connecting local systems (i.e., building bridges, gateways, etc.). It circles back to the investment in human infrastructure and bottom-up rather than top-down approaches.

(Cyber)infrastructures

Thoughts based upon the readings about infrastructure, especially “Understanding infrastructures: Dynamics, Tensions, and Designs”, a great report by P. Edwards, S. Jackson, G. Bowker, and C. Knobel

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Development of (cyber)infrastructures is not a merely technical/engineering issue. To ensure success we need to be aware of historical context and socio-political issues as well as the messiness of everyday practices.

Historical (dis)continuities underlie many infrastructural projects. Cyberinfrastructures and data science / curation problems did not appear out of nowhere in the 20th century. They have historical precursors, such as:

• information gathering activities by the state (statistics as science of state) and the development of sciences as accumulation of records
• the development of technologies and organizational practices to sort, sift and store information

Questions of ownership, management, control, and access are always present in infrastructural developments. With regard to data, years of private ownership in data has led to many idiosyncratic practices and formats, which, along with an absence of the metadata, prevent understanding and use by other scientists.

A good quote: “The consequence is that much “shared” data remains useless to others; the effort required for one group to understand another’s output, apply quality controls, and reformat it to fit a different purpose often exceeds that of generating a similar data set from scratch.” (p. 19 of the report)

Cyberinfrastructure development means system building. Successful system-builder teams are made up of technical “wizards”, who envision and create the system, a “maestro,” who orchestrates the organizational, financial, and marketing aspects of the system, and a “champion” who stimulates interest in the project, promotes it and generates adoption. During infrastructural growth, users and user communities can also become critical to success or failure.

Design-level perspective differs from the perspective on the ground. The former can be neat and organized, while the latter can be disorderly and requiring a lot of work. Finding ways to translate between these two perspectives and to incorporate lessons learned from “below” into design from “above” is a challenge and a crucial element of success.

A great quote: “It is also possible that a tech-centered approach to the challenge of data sharing inclines us toward failure from the beginning, because it leaves untouched underlying questions of incentives, organization, and culture that have in fact always structured the nature and viability of distributed scientific work.” (p. 32 of the report)

Additional reading – my other post about general issues in data curation.

Debate: ICTs and a better world

The role of ICTs in society is debated in the Journal of Information Technology (vol. 27, N 2, 2012, articles are available for free till June).

The opening article by Geoff Walsham makes several points that align with my own ideas and positions: he emphasizes the importance of ethical and critical components in the information systems research and the need for methodological pluralism and interdisciplinarity. He also encourages shifting the research agenda from helping organizations to use ICTs effectively to asking and trying to answer the question "Are we making a better world with ICTs?"

This question is deep, stimulating, good, etc. However, asking it will lead the IS field to even more problems rather than to solving its crises. Here is why.

1. This type of questions is inconsistent with organizational goals. There might be some types of organizations that think about improving the world, but all of them still have money, efficiency, profit, stakeholders, etc. as their priorities. And they need ICTs to serve those priorities. To put it in a larger context, can global capitalism be ethical and focus on the betterment of the world?
2. Better for whom? Even though a lot of people try to define and measure 'better' (in terms of GDP, numbers of phones and computers per household and so on), the definitions don't work. Because they serve those who come up with them rather than the rest of the world. One statement that stands out in this paper is "Our ethical goals in this arena should surely include how we can use ICTs to support the poor of the world..." There are so many problems with this statement. The most obvious one is that it's not "we" who should be agents in this sentence, it's "the poor". As long as the poor depend on our support, the world won't be better for them. But it will be for us, because it'll make us feel good.
3. Finally, can the world as a whole ever become better? Even the best intentions inevitably bring some evil, then is it honest from a personal and scholarly points of view to place such an idealistic question at the center of a research agenda? May be I'm too skeptical.

As I said above, a lot of what is said in the papers aligns with my own thoughts. But something is missing. Perhaps, more openness and critical questioning. Something that Ulrike Schultze tried to do in his commentary.