skip to main content
10.1145/1180875.1180950acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

The human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures. Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.

References

[1]
Atkins, D. 2003. Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure. Tech Report.
[2]
Bechky, B. 2006. Gaffers, Gofers, and Grips: Role-Based Coordination in Temporary Organizations. Organization Science, 17(1), 3--21.
[3]
Berman, F. 2001. The Human Side of Cyberinfrastructure. EnVision. 17(2): 1.
[4]
Bikson, T. and Eveland, J. 1996. Groupware Implementation: Reinvention in the Sociotechnical Frame. Proc. CSCW '96, 428--437.
[5]
Bowker, G. 1994. Information Mythology: The World As/Of Information. In Bud-Frierman (ed), Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, 231--247. London: Routeledge.
[6]
Cummings, J. and Kiesler, S. 2005. Collaborative Research Across Disciplinary and Organizational Boundaries. Social Studies of Science, 703--722.
[7]
Engeström, Y., Engeström, R., & Väähäaho, T. 1999. When the Center Doesn't Hold: The Importance of Knotworking. In S. Chaiklin, Hedegaard, M., & Jensen, U. (eds.), Activity Theory and Social Practice: Cultural-historical Approaches. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press.
[8]
Finholt, T. & Birnholtz, J. 2006. If we build it, will they come? The cultural challenges of cyberinfrastructure. In Bainbridge, W. & Roco, M. (eds) Managing nano-bio-info-cogno innovations. Berlin: Springer
[9]
Finholt, T.A. 2003. Collaboratories as a New Form of Scientific Organization. Economics of Innovation and New Technologies. 12(1): 5--25.
[10]
Fitzpatrick, G. 2001. Centres, Peripheries and Electronic Communication: Changing Work Practice Boundaries. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. 12(1-2)
[11]
Foster, I. and Kesselman, C. 2004. The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann
[12]
Galison, P. 1992. Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
[13]
Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., and Trow, M. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage.
[14]
Jirotka, M., Procter R., Rodden T., and Bowker, G. (eds) 2006. Special Issue - Collaboration in e-Research. CSCW Journal.
[15]
McCray, W.P. 2000. Large Telescopes and the Moral Economy of Recent Astronomy. Social Studies of Science, 30(5), 685--711.
[16]
Miller, D. and Slater, D. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford, UK: Berg.
[17]
Mortensen, M. and Hinds, P. 2002. Fuzzy Teams: Boundary Disagreement in Distributed and Collocated Teams. In Hinds & Kiesler (eds), Distributed Work. Cambridge: MIT Press.
[18]
Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., Schwarz, H. 2002. NetWORKers and their Activity in Intensional Networks. CSCW Journal, 11, 205--242.
[19]
Olson, J., Olson, G., Zimmerman, A. (eds) 2006. The Collaboratories Handbook, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[20]
Ribes, D. and Bowker, G. 2006. A Learning Trajectory for Ontology Development." Journal for the Association of Information Systems and Technology.
[21]
Rodden, T. and Benford, S. 2003. The Evolution of Buildings and Implications for the Design of Ubiquitous Domestic Environments. Proc. SIGCHI '03, 9--16
[22]
Schmidt, K. 1997. Of Maps and Scripts: The Status of Formal Constructs in Cooperative Work. Proc. GROUP'97, 138--147.
[23]
Sonnenwald, D. 2007. Scientific Collaboration: A Synthesis of Collaborations and Strategies. In Cronin, B. (ed), Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, vol. 4. Medford, NJ: Information Today.
[24]
Star, S.L. and Ruhleder, K. 1996. Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111--134.
[25]
Suchman, L. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[26]
Traweek, S. 1992. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High-Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Tales of Transitions: Seeking Scientific Software SustainabilityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/37012089:1(1-25)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Entangled Amid Misaligned Seams: Limitations to Technology-Mediated Care for Repairing Infrastructural Breakdowns in a Youth Empowerment ProgramProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36868968:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Sustaining Maintenance Labor for Healthy Open Source Software Projects through Human Infrastructure: A Maintainer PerspectiveProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686667(37-48)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2006
548 pages
ISBN:1595932496
DOI:10.1145/1180875
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 November 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. collaboratories
  2. cyberinfrastructure
  3. infrastructure
  4. teams

Qualifiers

  • Article

Conference

CSCW06
Sponsor:
CSCW06: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 4 - 8, 2006
Alberta, Banff, Canada

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)177
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)20
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Tales of Transitions: Seeking Scientific Software SustainabilityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/37012089:1(1-25)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Entangled Amid Misaligned Seams: Limitations to Technology-Mediated Care for Repairing Infrastructural Breakdowns in a Youth Empowerment ProgramProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36868968:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Sustaining Maintenance Labor for Healthy Open Source Software Projects through Human Infrastructure: A Maintainer PerspectiveProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686667(37-48)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Toward More Inclusive and Accessible Futures of Remote Work Using a Feminist Geographical LensProceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3663384.3663392(1-10)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Adopting Third-party Bots for Managing Online CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537078:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Towards Inclusive Futures for Worker WellbeingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374148:CSCW1(1-32)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Security Patchworking in Lebanon: Infrastructuring Across Failing InfrastructuresProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373978:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Navigating the Job-Seeking Journey: Challenges and Opportunities for Digital Employment Support in KashmirProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373758:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Infrastructuring Community Fridges for Food CommoningProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373528:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Aftermath: Infrastructure, Resources, and Organizational Adaptation in the Wake of DisasterProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36372948:CSCW1(1-24)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media