Introduction
Recent innovations in technological support for scientific collaboration offer the potential for revolutionary changes in the ways research is undertaken (Atkins et al.
2003) and scientific information infrastructures have become of key significance to research communities interested in supporting a variety of broader scale initiatives (Bowker et al.
forthcoming). Scientific collaborations using cyberinfrastructure—or e-Science, e-Research and e-Infrastructure as the emerging field is also called
1—are currently astir with exciting developments: initial understandings exist about recent undertakings and new challenges abound for all stakeholders including funding agency managers, technology developers, domain scientists and data specialists. Tensions have been observed, however, between the promises and drive to create new ways of doing science and the experiences of those who attempt to render the visions feasible in the context of their scientific work (Jirotka et al.
2006; Vann and Bowker
2006).
Despite the technological underpinnings of e-Science, a number of studies and ‘lessons learned’ types of papers have revealed the importance of associated human/social dimensions (e.g. Jirotka et al.
2005; Lawrence
2006; Spencer et al.
2006; Lee et al.
2006; Borgman et al.
2007). We continue this line of reasoning by investigating the intricacies involved in the collaborative development of scientific information infrastructures with a particular interest in a temporal perspective (Ancona et al.
2001). Development is at an initial stage in that there is a lack of understanding about how to build sustainable information infrastructures for scientific arenas (Jirotka et al.
2006; Spencer et al.
2006; Turner et al.
2006; Borgman
2007; Zimmerman
2007; Olson et al.
2008). We contend that scientific information infrastructure research and development poses a new kind of temporal challenge for the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), namely that of the long-term.
With the fundamental aim of understanding how concerted action is achieved, CSCW research has studied collaborative activity across spatial and temporal dimensions. Though the canonical and previously widely used categorization of collaborative contexts along the axes of same/different and place/time (Johansen
1988) has been largely criticized (e.g. Schmidt and Rodden
1996) and even abandoned as overly simplistic (e.g. Reddy et al.
2006), space and time remain central themes in CSCW research. Temporality has—in retrospect—received far less attention than the issues of space, a situation paraphrased as “distance matters” in the widely cited article by Olson and Olson (
2000). Though the problems of spatially distributed work have often taken analytic and technical precedence, “time also matters”, as Reddy and collaborators have pointed out (Reddy et al.
2006). A tour of the CSCW literature on time (Section
3) reveals an emphasis on short-term timeframe issues. We argue that infrastructure development, in addition to growing in spatial scope and complexity (Olson and Olson
2000; Kaplan and Seebeck
2001), has grown in terms of multiplying and extending the temporal aspects of work involved in supporting broader-scale collaborations.
Cyberinfrastructure projects to date have largely been developmental efforts (Borgman
2007). Since the field is still in its infancy in many ways with development efforts typically funded as short-term projects, the majority of cyberinfrastructure undertakings studied have been short-range and in early phases of forming a research collective supported by an infrastructure. Despite this, some studies show a level of awareness of the long-term perspective inherent to infrastructures and their development (e.g. Zimmerman
2007; Lee et al.
2006), though few have directly addressed long-term as an infrastructure issue (Karasti and Baker
2004; Baker and Chandler
2008; Ribes and Finholt
2007,
2009).
2 The research network with which we have a longitudinal involvement predates the cyberinfrastructure era, and thus allows us to study a more mature set of arrangements for long-term collaborative development of information infrastructure than present-day e-Science projects. In this paper we continue our exploration of the long-term perspective: from studying scientific information management with a focus on the stewardship of digital content over time (Karasti et al.
2006; Karasti and Baker
2008b), we return to addressing collaborative infrastructure development (Karasti and Baker
2004) with a more explicit interest in temporality.
We report on an empirical case involving the development of a metadata standard in a data-centric scientific domain, a complex example of infrastructure development as a long-term collaborative activity. Data-intensive—particularly referring to large in volume or computational demands—scientific collaboration is one of the heartlands of e-Science because data in digital form open new, appealing possibilities for large-scale research endeavors (National Science Board
2005; National Science Foundation
2007). The capacity for distributed, collaborative scientific work with data is posited on the existence of information infrastructures that support the coordination of data preservation, discovery and exchange (Hedstrom
2003; Arzberger et al.
2004; National Research Council
2007). Data-centric e-Research efforts, where infrastructure and information necessarily are intertwined, involve semantic work, i.e. the negotiation or creation of meanings and mechanisms for information organization through linguistic classification and development, and standard-making work, i.e. the development of procedures that informs determination of rules and requirements for classifications in order to improve consistency and interchangeability. Both semantics and standards are particularly prominent topic areas and essential types of infrastructure development work (Star
2002; Star and Lampland
2009; Hanseth et al.
1996; Jacobs
2006; Hine
2008; Randall et al.
2007,
2009). While there are many approaches and methods to semantic work, such as data dictionaries, controlled vocabularies, and ontologies (Baker et al.
2006a), our empirical case mainly deals with the development of a metadata standard. We investigate standard-making efforts involving the integration of semantic work and associated software tools development as one aspect of collaborative information infrastructure development (Randall et al.
2007,
2009; Ribes and Bowker
2008; Schuurman and Balka
2008).
In our case, the domain of ecology is faced with both data-intensive (large in size or volume and computational requirements) and data-rich (diverse or large in number of different types) data challenges (Karasti et al.
2006). Data volume challenges relate to the contemporary ‘data deluge’, i.e. exponentially increasing volumes of primary data in digital form generated by automated collection and production of data through ‘next generation’ experiments, simulations, sensors and satellites (Hey and Trefethen
2003; Borgman et al.
2007). Challenges with data diversity, in turn, relate the intrinsic character of the field, i.e. the unusually heterogeneous and complex nature of ecological data (Bowker
2000; Baker and Millerand,
forthcoming) that present daunting problems for interpretation and analysis (Zimmerman
2003). Ecological data, therefore, require intensive description and extensive contextualization in the form of metadata (Michener
2000; Jones et al.
2001) to be useful for the scientific purposes of collaborative research outside the place and time of their collection (Karasti and Baker
2008b). The use of standards in metadata description not only promises improved discovery and integration of the data but also automated access of importance to data-intensive research involving statistical approaches and data mining. The development of a metadata specification by a national center and its adoption by a research network as a standard has been described and discussed earlier (Millerand and Bowker
2008,
2009; Millerand and Baker
2010). This paper continues the narrative of the metadata standard as it unfolds today.
In our analysis, we use the term infrastructure as defined and conceptualized in Science and Technology Studies (STS). The notion of infrastructure by Star and Ruhleder (
1996) is a multifaceted concept referring to interrelated technical, social and organizational arrangements involving hardware and software technologies, standards, procedures, practices and policies together with digital configurations in support of human communication and capabilities. In the context of cyberinfrastructure, the concept has been used, for instance, to study the social organization of distributed collaboration in ‘big science’ and ‘big data’ (Lee et al.
2006; Aronova et al.
2010). While Star and Ruhleder’s (
1996) notion of infrastructure does not encompass an explicit design interest, it is useful in sensitizing us to the relational, historico-socio-technical aspects of infrastructure development. We use it in describing and discussing the work that goes into collaborative infrastructure development for a long-term ecological research domain.
In this paper we foreground the issue of long-term that has been recognized but has remained a background concern of information infrastructure development. We argue that without awareness of the multiple temporalities and particularly the long-term temporal scales, studies of infrastructure development remain largely influenced by the prevalent, taken-for-granted short-term temporalities. We emphasize that an understanding of the long-term perspective is needed and will benefit and enrich the exploration of many other infrastructure development issues, such as emergence vs. intentional development, and openness vs. closedness of solutions. With this work we also begin opening up the window of time in order to extend the temporal reach of CSCW theories, concepts, methods and applications. Our particular interest is in the actual infrastructure development work carried out by different participants and the temporal aspects associated with their work. Thus we consider collaborative processes in different but related arenas over time; we observe the associated design practices and approaches as well as the participant’s views using a temporal research lens (Ancona et al.
2001). For the purposes of the paper we use the widely used notion of ‘temporal scales’ (e.g. Zaheer et al.
1999) as well as the more specific one of ‘temporal orientations’ (Dubinskas
1988). We limit our focus to the short-term and long-term temporal scales in order to be able to present an analysis of a rich empirical study together with a theoretical discussion within the length of a journal paper. Using these temporal elements, we analyze our empirical case and identify two distinct ‘temporal orientations’ associated with collaborative infrastructure development: ‘project time’ and ‘infrastructure time’. This paper presents an alternative perspective to the traditional view of short-term demands and long-term goals that are typically perceived as a tension. The tension is recognized as a crucial aspect of and challenge in infrastructure development (Karasti and Baker
2004; Ribes and Finholt
2007,
2009). However, rather than treating the differing temporal scales merely as a tension, this paper puts forward the interplay of the two as a synergistic approach to infrastructure development, as is exemplified in the ‘infrastructure time’ development orientation of ‘continuing design’.
The following section provides theoretical background on the concepts of infrastructure and temporal scales with related research in Section
3. Section
4 introduces the empirical setting in an ecological research domain and our research approach of longitudinal involvement and interdisciplinary research strategy. Section
5 is devoted to presenting the metadata standard development study; it focuses on how the temporal scales of short-term and long-term are evoked, contested and blended in the process of collaborative infrastructure development work and elaborates on the differing views of the main parties involved. Section
6 discusses matters relevant to conceptualizing what is at stake in long-term infrastructure development work; it extends the notion of infrastructure and puts forward the temporal orientations of ‘project time’ and ‘infrastructure time’ and their related development orientations. Conclusions underscore the need to enrich understandings of temporality in both CSCW and e-Research and reveal the large extent of ramifications and challenges for all the associated stakeholders.
Within CSCW, temporal aspects of everyday work have been studied extensively, for instance, via studies of time management and temporal coordination (Egger and Wagner
1993; Bardram
2000; Crabtree et al.
2003; Reddy et al.
2006) and via investigations of rhythms, patterns and temporal trajectories (Reddy and Dourish
2002; Sandusky
2003; Seebeck et al.
2005; Nilsson and Hertzum
2005). Furthermore, temporal aspects of collaboration have been analyzed in relation to a number of collaboration technologies such as email (Tyler and Tang
2003) and groupware calendar systems (Lee
2003; Crabtree et al.
2003). There are a few studies that show interest in longer timeframes including articles highlighting aspects of long-term interaction in office work (Dix et al.
1998), the need to bridge the gap between face-to-face communication in long-term collaboration (Lindstaedt and Schneider
1997), the necessity to consider both real-time supervisory control work and differently paced design work (Sandusky
2003), and long-term collaboration in software maintenance (Lougher and Rodden
1993). Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that ‘long-term’ temporal scales in these studies refer to rather short-term timeframes, such as “hours, days or even weeks” (Dix et al.
1998, p. 9), “during different phases of a project” (Lindstaedt and Schneider
1997, p. 331), and “daily periods”, “weekly cycles” and “windows of time (during weekends and holidays)” (Sandusky
2003, p. 101). Only Lougher and Rodden acknowledge longer timeframes in relation to software maintenance work “extending over a period of many years with some systems even being in use for in excess of two decades” (
1993, p. 229). Correspondingly, durations of multiple years and decades found in our case study are relevant to the notion of ‘infrastructure time’, extending beyond moments of conversational turn-taking, workdays and work weeks that traditionally represent the long-term in studies of everyday interaction and collaboration.
Further, the notion of collaboratory used widely both in CSCW and cyberinfrastructure studies of scientific collaboration (e.g. Sonnenwald
2003; Finholt
2002; Olson et al.
2008), has a spatial-specific cast. Collaboratories were initially defined as “center[s] without walls in which researchers can work together regardless of physical location” (Wulf
1993). A more recent definition continues with a focus on spatial distribution and interest in real-time interaction in stating: “A collaboratory is an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.” (Olson et al.
2008, p. 3). The typology of collaboratories (Bos et al.
2008) focuses on different ways of creating large-scale organizational structures for scientific collaboration, and from the temporal point of view usually differentiates between synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaboration.
In the field of information systems at large, collaborative development work is typically organized as projects (see e.g. Avison and Torkzadeh
2008). In projects, time is traditionally viewed as a scarce resource of measurable clock time to be ordered through design methods and models delimited by project management which in research and development (R & D) settings relates to periods of funded project time. However, such formal approaches based on a mechanistic model of work appear inadequate to manage team members’ practices in contemporary working environments (Nandhakumar
2002). A number of studies have made visible the multitude of temporalities involved in the actual practices of information systems development (Nandhakumar and Jones
2001; Nandhakumar
2002; Stacey and Nandhakumar
2009; see also Bucciarelli
1988). Furthermore, a study of software development in the Internet environment shows how developers’ approaches, methods and practices are formed in relation to the temporal characteristics of the Internet industry. Thus, software development associated with web delivery emphasizes shorter cycle times and introduces shorter than traditional temporal scales known as internet-speed or web-speed (Baskerville et al.
2003). Infrastructure development has not yet received similar temporal interest, though related issues such as standardization vs. flexibility, global vs. local, and small-scale vs. large-scale (Hanseth et al.
1996; Monteiro
1998; Rolland and Monteiro
2002), have been investigated.
The suggestion to transform ‘infrastructure’ into a transitive verb as initially proposed by Star and Bowker in an article asking “How to infrastructure?” (
2002), prompted a stream of research (e.g. Karasti and Baker
2004; Karasti and Syrjänen
2004; Edwards et al.
2007; Pipek and Wulf
2009; Baker and Millerand,
forthcoming) investigating development processes in terms of ‘infrastructuring’. Incremental, iterative processes, discerned as ‘growing’ over time, contribute to questioning whether infrastructures can be built at all in the traditional sense of technology development (cf. Freeman
2007). Traditional measures of size in terms of numbers of participants and systems or of computational cycles and storage units are not taken as the most important denominator of infrastructures; rather infrastructural systems and their integration are the focus (Hanseth and Lundberg
2001; Karasti and Syrjänen
2004; Pipek and Wulf
2009). Some of these studies draw on previous research on continuing design in use (Henderson and Kyng
1991) and tailoring (Trigg and Bødker
1994), and later work on appropriation (Pipek
2005) with roots in the Participatory Design tradition where development is seen as taking place over time. Yet, these approaches of ‘infrastructuring’ deal with long-term processes and related problematics implicitly rather than with explicit analysis of the temporal.
Within Science and Technology Studies, long-term temporal scales are common and studies may span long historical periods. Seminal works on large-scale technological systems providing broad level, policy-oriented historical analyses demonstrated the need to pay attention to innovation processes over the long-term to understand major technological developments and institutional changes (Hughes
1983). More recent works within STS looking at information infrastructure development consider time as a base-level tension that adds complexity to the work of infrastructure building—when short and long-term funded projects don’t suit the even longer time scales over which infrastructures typically develop and take hold (Edwards et al.
2007). “The time scale in historical studies of infrastructural change is decades to centuries—considerably longer than most research projects in cyberinfrastructure!” (Edwards et al.
2007, p. 8). Ethnographic studies argue for paying attention to the diverse temporalities of all the involved actors (e.g. scientists, information technology specialists, informatics researchers, data specialists, communities, funding agencies) as an alternative to viewing infrastructure growth in sequential phases, e.g. emergence, maturation, loss of impetus and so on, according to linear time (Millerand and Bowker
2009). Following Latour (
1996), it is argued that “time is a variable, not an explanatory framework for the phenomenon under consideration” (Millerand and Bowker
2008, p. 280). Such a perspective on time allows one to “better grasp how the existence and even the reality of projects vary over time, in line with the engagement or disengagement of actors in the development of these projects or objects” (Millerand and Bowker
2009, p. 151).
Much of the STS oriented research on cyberinfrastructure has investigated the organization of large-scale, multi-institutional undertakings developing both social and technological infrastructure. Focus is on the commonly identified difficulties, such as communication, collaboration and coordination, in the new organizational structures that serve geographically distributed collaborations (Olson and Olson
2000; Finholt
2002; Lawrence
2006; Lee et al.
2006). From the point of view of long-term temporal scales, the work by Ribes and Finholt (
2009) offers an interesting exception. They utilize Stuart Brand’s concept of ‘the long now’ as a conceptualization of time that demands sustainability become of central concern today. Infrastructure development may be seen as an occasion for ‘the long now’: “it is a concept that collapses immediate design and deployment with the work of maintenance and sustainable development” (Ribes and Finholt
2009, p. 393). Through an analysis of participants’ formulation of the problems encountered in developing long-term information infrastructure, Ribes and Finholt identify a set of tensions in order to delineate “the problem space in which choices about information infrastructure design are made” (p. 393). In such a ‘problem space’, we analyze the actual practices and concrete ways that participants in a particular endeavor have developed over time for dealing with long-term collaborative infrastructure development.
Empirical setting and research approach
An ecological research domain
The empirical case in this paper is situated within an ecological research domain. The infrastructure development in this study may be identified as collaborative work that occurs in three arenas: (1) a national center for the domain of ecological sciences, (2) an ecological research network, and (3) individual research sites that constitute the research network. The main parties associated with the infrastructure development of interest are developers at a national center and information managers located at sites within the research network. The national center in question is the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), and the research network is the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.
The US LTER is a network of research sites carrying out ecological research collaboratively according to the LTER program and traditions. The LTER program was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) with the idea of scaling up both spatially and temporally from typical small-scale and short-term ecological studies (Hobbie et al.
2003). Long-term ecological research spans diverse spatial and temporal scales, recognizing historical change as a key to understanding the present and anticipating the future (Callahan
1984; Magnuson
1990). The timeframes involved in long-term ecological research are illustrated by 200–1,000 year experiments (Harmon et al.
1999; Smith
2003; Foster and Aber
2004). Since establishment in 1980, the research network has been supported by NSF long-term funding arrangement. Sites are selected to become part of the LTER program through competitions held by NSF. After the initial competition, they no longer compete against one another; rather, each site is evaluated every six years for continuation and renewal of funding.
The 26 research sites that currently form the research network study their particular local biomes, i.e. climatically and geographically defined ensembles of communities of plants, animals, and soil organisms, often referred to as ecosystems. The sites design their own field measurement programs, collect long-term time series data, and take responsibility for the management of research data produced locally. Aligning with the aim of the research network to create a legacy of well-designed and documented long-term experiments and observations for use by future generations, many sites have legacy data going back well over a hundred years. Data management has been an integral part of the research network since its inception, and its importance has grown to be described as information management (Baker et al.
2000). The data-rich nature of ecology and the work associated with long-term datasets together form the very foundation for long-term ecological research. Consequently, the timeframes of information management intertwine with those of long-term ecological research, legacy datasets, and expectations of future reuse, effectively extending the temporal scope and thereby the perspective of participants from the past well into the future.
In addition to being charged with the care of data, site information managers are also responsible for the development and maintenance of local infrastructures. Thus, each site has its own practices and arrangements for data management including a data repository and local software tools. Though anchored at their sites, information managers have developed an all-site forum called the Information Management Committee that forms a ‘Community of Practice’ (Lave and Wenger
1991). This collective forum offers them an opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences with diverse local arrangements as well as to collaboratively develop information infrastructure for the research network (Karasti and Baker
2004; Karasti et al.
2006). In recent years, a new urgency has been introduced by cyberinfrastructure efforts; the information managers have become challenged to change from their established ways that support data use for site-based research to collaborate on infrastructure efforts that enable wider community and public (re)use of the data. This new work is largely predefined by participation in large-scale, multi-institutional cyberinfrastructure initiatives with network partners including national centers (Cushing et al.
2005; ARL Workshop in New Collaborative Relations
2006). Following the documentation of the concept of non-spatial metadata by a committee within the Ecological Society of America (Michener et al.
1997), development of the metadata specification, i.e. the Ecological Metadata Language (EML), was proposed to NSF as the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity project. The research effort was funded for three years (1999–2002) and centered at NCEAS. Development of the metadata standard brought LTER information managers together with NCEAS developers.
With this case study, we are presenting a snapshot of a research network gradually unfolding over three decades (1980–ongoing) that highlights semantic work and associated software tools development as a crucial part of the infrastructure required for data-rich collaborative ecological research. The metadata standard in question is a specification for describing ecological datasets so that they can be understood beyond their point of origin and place of initial processing. Metadata are structured statements about other data, in this case about primary observational data, and a standard defines the structure and elements that provide the information needed by other researchers for interpreting correctly the data. For instance, in a simple case, metadata for a dataset would include a dataset title, keywords, abstract and owner name as well as the names and units of each variable. While with a few thousand datasets such indexing work may appear mundane at a research group or laboratory scale, the complexity of this work explodes. Larger assemblages of datasets, needed for interdisciplinary research where data cross-disciplinary domains, space and time, make a comprehensive metadata standard elusive. A metadata standard would need to provide a structured yet harmonized framework for describing diverse data at increasing levels of detail needed for enabling data discovery, access, query, integration, exchange, and comparability. In the case we study, a metadata standard would enable queries for data discovery and comparability to be made across all research network sites’ datasets seamlessly, and ultimately across those within the domain of environmental sciences.
Longitudinal involvement and interdisciplinary research strategy
Our collective research approach can be described as long-term involvement, necessary because the investigation of infrastructure requires long-term commitment. This is supported by interdisciplinary partnerships that include membership in and experience with the research network, information management, science and technology studies, computer supported collaborative work, participatory design, workplace studies and that foster ongoing learning upon which this paper draws.
Our collective research environment supports the study of longer temporal scales in, at least, three ways. First, we have had the rare chance to be involved with and studying the US ecological research network in question for a number of years. Baker has been a practicing researcher since 1990 when the first of the two sites for which she is an information manager started in the network. Karasti did fieldwork within the US research network in 2002 and has continued participation in and study of long-term ecological research at different organizational levels and geographical regions including international, European and Finnish networks. Millerand carried out fieldwork within the same US research network starting in 2004 and continues studying it, notably the information management community as well as the development of cyberinfrastructure and standards. As a result, we have formed longitudinal understanding(s) about the empirical setting. Second, the research network has existed for three decades, and thus provides a relatively mature setting to be studied. It is a research network with history, culture, customs and infrastructure arrangements predating the cyberinfrastructure era; it has various trajectories of change as well as ongoing change processes. Third, the research network itself is profoundly oriented towards the long-term perspective, both in science, information management and infrastructure work. This provides opportunities to study the ways and methods that network participants have created to deal with the complexities, concerns, and constraints inherent to the long-term temporal scope of its core interests and activities.
The empirical data for the research reported in this paper were collected by Millerand and Baker within the research network from 2004 to 2006. During this two year period, they conducted 15 interviews, attended meetings about the metadata standard (e.g. working groups), participated in numerous discussions and phone calls about the metadata standard and related topics, and made frequent observations on the standardization process across the LTER sites. Corpus for document analysis included proposals, surveys and reports including articles in the information manager newsletter, technical documentation (e.g. EML Best Practices) as well as tool prototypes and demos.
Our individual empirical work within the long-term ecological research network(s) and subsequent shared—yet also differently positioned—understanding(s) have allowed us to carry out research and analysis as a distributed team. Our distance collaboration has been supported by Internet technologies such as conference calls, email and shared workspaces. We first discussed several possible interesting cases from each of our three distinct experiences with the fieldwork. The metadata standard case emerged quickly as interesting because it showed salient temporal issues. Since only two of us have been closely involved with the case, we built a detailed narrative from which we could work and carry out new analysis focusing on temporal dimensions. During analysis sessions we have talked and shared interpretations about the empirical data in considering how different temporal scales are woven into the practices of and participants’ views about infrastructure development work. Also, we have drawn broadly upon our experiences within the empirical setting over the long term.
Our collective research approach is based on an interdisciplinary research strategy where we pooled and modified our theoretical and methodological frameworks to be able to grasp the complexity and the expanse of infrastructure development. Unlike a multidisciplinary approach that would address infrastructure development from independent disciplinary points of view—thus leading to the production of distinct discourses with the risk of a research object being parceled out, we engaged in an interdisciplinary approach by aiming at developing a common conceptual framework—thus expanding our existing disciplinary-marked research perspectives (Klein
1990). For instance, the combination of information management insights and attention to science and technology ethnographic perspectives was critical in carrying out the detailed analysis of standards development as it occurred. Further, bringing participatory development into the analysis highlighted aspects of standard-making as collaborative infrastructure development. Integration of STS with interdisciplinary works on time research significantly opened up our understanding of the temporal issues at play in collaborative infrastructure development.
Conclusions
With this study of semantic work and tools development associated with standard-making as a collaborative infrastructure development, we demonstrate that investigating the temporal aspects of collaboration is equally as important as the more recognized spatial aspects. Given the experience gained with short-term temporal aspects in CSCW, it is now time to augment such studies by investigation of issues relating to long-term temporalities. This includes exploring time as a contributor to diversity and represents an alternative to focus on the temporal extremes as a short-term and long-term polemic tension. We believe that the concepts developed in this paper, i.e. the temporal orientation of ‘infrastructure time’ and the design orientation of ‘continuing design’, can be useful in settings of long-term collaborative infrastructure development and invite researchers to examine them critically.
The ramifications of the notion of ‘infrastructure time’ are many. It does not promise solutions to recognized CSCW problematics, rather it proposes challenges for temporal diversification and motivation for more temporally oriented work to be carried out in the CSCW field. Key CSCW concepts will benefit from re-examination in light of extended temporal scales, and new ones explicitly encompassing the long-term will have to be constructed. Serious interest in the temporal dimension of collaboration requires extending the existing research methodological repertoire, such as with long-term involvement. Although we have not been focusing on collaborative technologies in this paper, we suggest in studies of collaboration that an increased interest in temporalities in general, and long-term in particular, would also have an effect on the technologies developed.
We find in large-scale research an understanding is emerging that infrastructure development is an interdisciplinary activity involving domain scientists, technology developers and data specialists. As demonstrated in this paper, participants in collaborative infrastructure development will also have to account for and accommodate long-term temporal scales and orientations, thus methods and tools need to be developed to support them. Further, funding agency managers will need to understand the long-term temporal scales pertinent to infrastructure development. Funding not just for short-term, cutting-edge technology projects but also for innovation that emerges within long-term, continuing design projects is critically important. Long-term funding makes it financially and organizationally possible for the development orientations of both project time and infrastructure time to co-exist, putting them in a position to co-inform and cross-fertilize.
Known for its insights into collaborative work gained largely through micro-analytic workplace studies, CSCW research holds the potential to contribute in important ways to the study and development of infrastructure including e-Research infrastructure. Due to the traditional bias toward short-term, we have, in this paper, emphatically foreground the long-term temporal scale and perspective because both short-term and long-term temporal orientations and development approaches have to be understood in relation to each other in order to support large-scale and long-lasting infrastructures. We encourage future CSCW research to encompass an interest in more diversified temporalities so that forthcoming studies of infrastructure are better prepared to address and integrate extended temporal scopes in to their explorations of further issues of collaborative infrastructure development. There is currently little empirically-based understanding about how e-Research infrastructures are integrated into actual research practices and collaborative endeavors, and how they are taken up, enacted, tailored, appropriated and further developed over time. Our collective long-term investigation has just begun.