The narratives we infrastructure by

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Gianluca Miscione Raoni Rajão

EASST 2010 Trento

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

_{Introduction on information infrastructures narratives}

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Cases:

 _{Spatial data infrastructure in the Amazon}  _{Free and Open Source Software in “the South”} 

Beyond Boundary Objects?

2 Gianluca Miscione and Raoni Rajão

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Information infrastructures are empirically elusive,

especially to site‐bound methodologies



_{Infrastructures are not organizationally confined}



_{“Webscale” is explanatory beyond web}

Here: narrative to capture their makings and evolutions

Two cases:



Spatial Data Infrastructures in the Amazon



_{Free and Open Source SW in “the South”}

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As Hollywood noted “IT are not eye‐catching” (Bowker)

So:



_{Infrastructural inversion}

(Star, Pinch) 

_{Zooming IN/OUT}

(Nicolini) 

Unbounded ethnography

(Engestrom, Marcus) 

The end of the virtual

(Rogers)

Different ways of making a point STS‐OS and design‐

engineering research: STS‐OS is witty, for the latter a

good point is one whose effects scale up

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Gianluca Miscione and Raoni Rajão 5 2 1 4 3 Geoinformation explosion starting in 2000s: Government: 1) Satellite imagery and deforestation data; 2) Political, topographical, environmental and demographic data; 3) Rural properties licensing/registry systems; Farmers: 4) Property‐level data for licensing/registry.

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Ongoing tensions and divergences between groups in the Amazon:  For the government farmers are “criminals”;  For the farmers the government is “unfair” for imposing restrictive laws. Yet, groups draw upon the narrative of “sustainable development”:  Farmers: SDI legitimate the sustained access to national and international markets;  For the government: SDI contributes to environmental protection and international relations (i.e. soft power). 6 Gianluca Miscione and Raoni Rajão

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Shared narrative has contributed to SDI growth:  Increasing data (e.g. new satellites, more registered farmers);  Similar data standards (e.g. shapefile, SAD 69);  Similar access policies (e.g. freely available on the Internet).

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From MISCIONEG. ANDSTARING K. (2009) “SHIFTINGGROUND FORHEALTH

INFORMATIONSYSTEMS: LOCALEMBEDDEDNESS, GLOBAL FIELDS ANDLEGITIMIATION”

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(from dealings and doings)

For:

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Local salaries

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‘Certification of fairness’

‐

No viruses

Not prominent

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Local knowledge development

‐

‘Appropriation’

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 _{makes heterogeneous actors (like ministries, research and} health care institutions, consultants, NGOs, WHO and EU personnel) to perform distributed and coordinated activities  _{perceived reliability of FOSS is not universal, reliability in} “the crowd” cannot be taken‐for‐granted, copyright and other FOSS‐related rules may be not present, or not enforced  _{Meanwhile, software development takes place mostly} elsewhere 11 Gianluca Miscione and Raoni Rajão

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• “Sustainability” and “FOSS technologies” contributed to making IT an acceptable vector of innovation (they do not imply common understanding and principles)  _{IT related narratives (rather than inherent fluidity) helped} to accommodate a variety of context‐bound socio‐technical actors  _{Czarniawska and Sevón [2005] look at the travel of ideas at} the global level. The legitimizing role of myth is clearly presented by Noir and Walsham [2007], also Mosco [2004] 12 Gianluca Miscione and Raoni Rajão

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Boundary objects:

 _{Objects that are "both plastic enough to adapt to local} needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393) 

Narrative infrastructures in product development:

 _{Unfolding set of “narrative blocks […] that because of} their being accepted, orient further action and interaction in the setting (and across its boundaries)” (Deuten and Rip, 2000: 74) 13 Gianluca Miscione and Raoni Rajão

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It is “narrative” because it is a story that provides a non‐

substantialist rockbed for unfolding and time‐bound

agreements from which infrastructuring takes place.

But it is also “boundary object” because rather than

having a single narrative block it is plastic enough to

allow the emergence of different (or even

contradictory) local stories.

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