The Dialectical Tensions in the Funding Infrastructure of Cyberinfrastructure

Abstract

This article focuses on funding for cyberinfrastructure and how funding affects the cyberinfrastructure foundation laid, who completes the work, and what the outcomes of the funding are. By following qualitative procedures and thematic analysis, we identify five dialectical tensions across three difference levels of institutions, individuals, and ideologies in the funding infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure. Through an organizational communication lens, we define funding infrastructure as the communication arrangements of institutions, individuals, and ideologies that must be coordinated in order for cyberinfrastructure to be brought into existence. These communication arrangements include salient motivations of and financial compensations for individuals who engage in them. They also comprise explicit policies about funding, as well as implicit ideologies about science embedded in funding, as held by institutions involved in these communication arrangements.

Why CSCW needs science policy (and vice versa)

“…Some of these themes are taken up and extended in Ribes & Finholt [38], which locates cyberinfrastructure development and practice in a wider and multi-scalar frame, including a series of macro-level tensions that operate at the institutional level of funders like the NSF. Kee [29] makes a similar point, linking challenges and discrepancies in scientific collaboration to a series of "dialectical tensions" in the funding of cyberinfrastructure. Cummings and Kiesler's [9] analysis of NSF ITR grants from the 1990s has revealed the significant coordination costs imposed by the inter-institutional organization of academic research teams.…”

Enacting technology

“…Use of the term tension in this thesis denotes inner striving, unrest, or imbalance from seemingly opposing forces or conflicting demands to make decisions (Kee and Browning, 2010;Carlsson and El Sawy, 2008). Amon others, sources of tension in digital infrastructure include: diverging interests and end-goals among stakeholder ; policies about funding and ideologies (Kee and Browning, 2010); pursuit of control over key parts of an installed base (Nielsen, 2006); competing concerns of the present and those for the future (Richter, 2011). "Short-term experiences of gain and loss will shape the incentive structures of individuals and institutions tasked with responding to infrastructural change.…”

“…The long now perspective conceptualizes the problem space for developing digital infrastructure as a set of tensions that emerge at the intersection of scales of infrastructure work (enacting technology, organizing work, and institutionalizing) and concerns for longterm sustainability (aligning end-goals, motivating contribution across stakeholder groups, designing for use) . Tensions can be defined as inner striving, unrest, or imbalance from seemingly opposing forces or conflicting demands to make decisions (Kee and Browning, 2010;Carlsson and El Sawy, 2008). Extant literature suggests that digital infrastructure cannot be fully realized purely on the basis of elaborate maps or blueprints (Jackson et al, 2007;Aanestad and Jensen, 2011).…”

Historical ontology and infrastructure

“…Scholars of infrastructure have studied the long-term of such organizations as a matter of changing technology [4], data [5], scale [6], practice [7], organization [8], rhythms of collaboration [9] or funding structures [10]. Such changes present challenges to infrastructure, which ultimately seeks to be a persistent set of resources that can also support the ongoing daily activities of heterogeneous actors [11].…”