Star Rhuelder Eco Infrastructure

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A useful summary definition in this vein is offered by Star and Ruhleder, who define infrastructure as being:

• Embedded in other structures, social arrangements, and technologies;
• Transparent (and largely invisible) once established, “reappearing” only at moments of upheaval or breakdown;
• Defined by its reach beyond particular spatial or temporal locations;
• Learned as a part of membership within particular professional, social, or cultural communities;
• Deeply linked with conventions of practice and other forms of routinized social action;
• Built on, shaped and constrained by its relationship to an already installed base;
• Fixed and changed in modular increments, through complex processes of negotiation and mutual adjustment with adjacent systems, structures, and practices [9].

"An electronic community system is a computer system which encodes the knowledge of a community and provides an environment which supports manipulation of that knowledge. Different communities have different knowledge but their environment has great similarities. The community knowledge might be thought of as being stored in an electronic library.” (Schatz, 1991: 88) - sounds like a wiki to me...

CSCW have looked at how infrastructure effect work communication and decision making.

"Can an organizational support system be developed that allows people to coordinate large-scale efforts, provide navigational aids for newcomers, yet still retain the feeling of an informal, close-knit community or cohesive organizational culture? If structure is not incorporated a priori, then does it emerge, and how?"