OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
stakeholders. This community might help assure that the OER and OPLI initiatives produce positive externalities and large social surplus.
Since the 1980s, historians, sociologists, economists, and information scientists have been studying how and why infrastructures form and evolve; how they work; and how they sometimes disintegrate or fail. This work reveals some base-level tensions that complicate infrastructural development and challenge simple notions of building infrastructure as a planned, orderly, and mechanical act. These tensions and examples of them include
- Time—short-term funding decisions vs. the longer time scales over which infrastructures typically grow and take hold;
- Scale—disconnects between global interoperability and local optimization; and
- Agency—navigating processes of planned vs. emergent change in complex and multiple-determined systems.
Important concepts and points made by this workshop, and adopted extensively from their report, include the following:
4.2.1 Fostered, Not Built
Infrastructure is not built from a blueprint, nor necessarily a centralized government-dominated activity. Cyberinfrastructure, especially, emerges from highly distributed, complex, multi-actor processes informed by heuristics for linking isolated and local systems. Although "systems" are technically recursive (a system is a system of systems), it is useful to distinguish infrastructure as resulting from establishing interoperability between otherwise heterogeneous local and specialized systems. (For example transformers, inverters, and mechanical plug-adapters enable a global electricity infrastructure.)
The complications of time, scale, and agency challenge simple notions of infrastructure building as a planned, orderly, and mechanical act. They also suggest that boundaries between technical and social solutions are mobile, in both directions: the path between the technological and the social is not static and there is no one correct mapping. Robust cyberinfrastructure will develop only when social, organizational, and cultural issues are resolved in tandem with creating technology-based services. Attention to these concerns will be critical to long-term success.
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