Bietz, M. J., E. P. S. Baumer, C. P. Lee. (2010). “Synergizing in Cyberinfrastructure Development.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 19(3-4): 3-4.
Bietz et al. studied a nascent marine metagenomics collaboration called Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA), focusing on the work of the developers in creating infrastructure for the group. This paper takes the authors’ earlier work on human infrastructure (Lee et al 2006) and expands it to include notions of synergizing, leveraging and aligning. They define synergizing as the “active, strategic work of managing multiple relationships for infrastructure development” (p. 251) and relate it to the concept of the embeddedness of the developers as both a constraint and a resource. Developers, defined as anyone involved in the development of a new infrastructure, are required to work within the rules and limitations of the various infrastructures in which they are already embedded (e.g., a university, a development team, an academic discipline), while they are able to take advantages of the relationships they have at their disposal thanks to those infrastructures (e.g., coworkers from former development projects, existing technology transfer agreements with other universities). Developers leverage existing relationships and technologies in service of their goals, while also aligning themselves with others to get work done.
The bottom line here is that CI cannot be fully understood without taking into account both the social and technological issues inherent in building new infrastructure. For example, the authors demonstrate how some tech decisions are made for social reasons, such as choosing the software the university already supports even if it’s not the most robust or sharing server space with collaborators rather than purchasing one’s own.
Like Lee et al.’s original human infrastructure paper, I find this work very useful for my own research on coordinating centers because of its focus on the messiness of science. I think it’s a myth that it’s possible to implement scientific research according to a 5-year plan; the very raison d’etre of science is exploring something we don’t fully understand. In fact, it would be an interesting study to compare the timeline proposed in grant proposals with what actually happened in the project! A research project needs to retain enough flexibility to respond to changes in not only the science and technology but also the people involved. Can we embrace the messiness of science instead of trying to control it with arbitrary schedules and deadlines?
Lee, C. P., Dourish, P., & Mark, G. (2006). The human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 483–492). New York: ACM.
