Socio-technical arrangement of cyberinfrastructure

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This this terminology describes the link between people and ci. Want to find literature that describes both vertical (human/machine) and (human/human) interactions.

Infrastructure stretches across multiple scales of action: institutionalizing; organizing work; and enacting technology.

Finally, at the scale of enacting technology, developers of infrastructure want to design and deploy durable resources to support work, automate tedious tasks and enable collaboration.

Furthermore, for computer scientists and information technologists there is a thin but important line between providing the support necessary for the research and slipping into a service capacity. This is particularly a problem for the administrative or managerial agents in CI design projects: how to organize the work in CI projects such that participants are both advancing in their careers (conducting research) and performing the more basic technical tasks required to deliver production CI systems?

This is true both from the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ foundations of CI (David 2004): computing and network capacity on the one hand and on the other the community’s experience collaborating or willingness to share data.

Veblen articulated two mechanisms by which latecomers may gain advantage: i - obsolescence of machinery through improvement and ii - through a transformation in the ‘technological situation.’To understand both mechanisms we must first understand what today is called the inertia of the ‘installed base’: “economical, technical, and organizational investments in the existing […] infrastructure.” (Monteiro 1997:230). These investments preclude, or at least discourage, radical changes in base technologies which, in turn, shape developmental trajectories of emerging technologies.

Ribes Himholt