History and Theory of Infrastructure

I'm just back from a workshop on "History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Infrastructure" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which brought together a fascinating group of social scientists and others to discuss "what practical lessons can the history, sociology, and experience of existing infrastructures offer to the imagination, implementation, and governance of cyberinfrastructure."

One delightful aspect of the meeting was meeting wonderful scholars that I had known previously only by reputation, such as Geoff Bowker, Leigh Star, Paul Duguid, and Christine Borgman, as well as some I already knew, such as Tom Finholt, Bob Kahn, Dan Atkins, and Bill Dutton, and others that I was glad to get to know.

There were many fascinating and wide-ranging discussions. My impressions:

• Social scientists (or at least those at the University of Michigan's School of Information) organize great meetings. The organizers had clearly put a lot of thought into how to structure the meeting to ensure useful discussion, and they also had excellent social events!
• The mode of discussion was quite different from I expected. There were no formal presentations and little analysis, but many compelling anecdotes. At first, I found this strange, but then realized that "stories" are a compelling way  of conveying insights. That got me thinking: what "stories" should we be telling people embarking on cyberinfrastructure projects, to help them avoid mistakes and achieve success?
• Another thought that seemed interesting, at least to me: How about designing cyberinfrastructure to collect the information that social scientists require to evaluate its utility? Large systems like TeraGrid, Open Science Grid, Earth System Grid, caBIG, or GEON, and also smaller systems, could be viewed as experimental apparatus for social scientists. What instrumentation should we include in them to that end?

Overall, I didn't come away convinced that the history of existing infrastructures can help those building cyberinfrastructure: railroads and networks are very different thing. But I became yet more convinced that social scientists have a lot to contribute to our understanding of how science and its tools will, and should, evolve in the 21st Century.