Firaz Peer: Hello, everyone. My name is Firaz Peer, and today i'll be talking to you about the work that infrastructural bricoleurs do in building civic data dashboards.
Firaz Peer: The work I'm presenting today is grounded in the field of digital civics which is concerned with using digital technologies to empower citizens. The goal in many of these projects is to broaden participation in local governance and local public institutions through interactive systems and data driven service delivery.
Firaz Peer: one tool that's becoming a popular way of empowering citizens through data is the civic data dashboard.
Firaz Peer: These dashboards are usually free and publicly accessible visual manefestations of data that are of common interest to the community within which they are situated.
Firaz Peer: These dashboards typically consist of a variety of graphs, tables, and maps about the community's, demographics, education, public safety, health, et cetera.
Firaz Peer: But what does it take to create such a dashboard? Who are the actors, and what roles do they play in the creation of such dashboards.
Firaz Peer: What are the kinds of social-technical infrastructures that need to be in place for such a dashboard to exist?
Firaz Peer: These are some of the questions that I was motivated by when working on this project.
Firaz Peer: The specific research question I'm asking here is, what role do individual stakeholders play in the infrastructuring of civic data dashboards within resource-constrained communities.
Firaz Peer: To answer this question, I took a two-pronged approach where I worked as a developer and ethnographer of the historic West Side Alliance data dashboard.
Firaz Peer: This dashboard was designed to serve the advocacy needs of residents and community leaders in the historic West Side neighborhoods in Atlanta.
Firaz Peer: The development of the dashboard was initiated and funded by the Dean of a nearby public university. My involvement in the dashboard started through a data science for social good program
Firaz Peer: where I was part of a team that developed the dashboard's, Public Safety module
Firaz Peer: being part of the development team, allowed me to observe the underlying infrastructure through which the data dashboard came together.
Firaz Peer: This included observing the code databases, programmers, managers, teams, spaces, funding power and politics, through which the dashboard came to fruition.
Firaz Peer: I study this dashboard, not as a tool or the interface that needs to be evaluated, but as a social technical assemblage which is influenced by and has an influence on the context within which it's being developed.
Firaz Peer: In addition to the technical development of the Public Safety Module, I also participated in Public Safety Committee meetings and events to get a better sense of who I was designing for and what their goals were
Firaz Peer: After The module was built, I also intervened.
Firaz Peer: I also interviewed the dashboard leadership team and community leaders who were involved in conceptualizing and building the dashboard
Firaz Peer: I also reviewed archive reports, documents, and workshop materials in order to get a better sense of how this dashboard came about.
Firaz Peer: When the Dean initiated this project. She was concerned that there was a lot of data being generated about the community, but it wasn't easily accessible to anyone.
Firaz Peer: If you needed information you had to dig it up, she said, or, more than likely, people were reinventing the same kinds of information over and over again, and it will end up on a shelf or not be useful for the next person.
Firaz Peer: When building the dashboard. The Dean was strapped for funds, so she made use of the most abundant resource available to her on campus, its students.
Firaz Peer: The team that the Dean put together included students in different capacities as researchers, developers, staff members and project managers. Faculty from different colleges also served as advisors on the project.
Firaz Peer: The Dean and the leadership team she put together practiced a form of work called infrastructural Bricolage when building this dashboard
Firaz Peer: bricolage has been described as the practice of making with what is materially or culturally available rather than building from scratch. It embodies a way of thinking that is fundamentally different from engineering. Where the engineer starts off by procuring the wrong materials required to get the job done.
Firaz Peer: The bricoleur works with a fixed set of tools and materials that are available at hand
Firaz Peer: to give you a sense of what this infrastructural bricolage looked like, let's consider the dashboard itself. The
Firaz Peer: many of its modules were not coded from scratch, but were built by multiple teams of graduate students using existing systems and platforms.
Firaz Peer: The community profile and education modules which included census data,
Firaz Peer: were built by graduate research assistants.
Firaz Peer: The project manager built the historic timeline page, using a visualization tool called Tiki-Toki
Firaz Peer: graduate research assistance also built the historic data page, using the Gapminder and the Google Charts Api's. The
Firaz Peer: The Resources page was built with Omeka.
Firaz Peer: The workforce Training page was built in Html
Firaz Peer: students in a data visualization class built transportation page, using D3,
Firaz Peer: and we in the DSSG program built the Public safety module.
Firaz Peer: The Dashboard leadership team continued the development of the dashboard this way by tapping into its locally available resources.
Firaz Peer: In April of two thousand and seventeen the Dean decided to terminate the dashboard.
Firaz Peer: One of the reasons for this decision was a lack of funding. I offer more details about why this happened and what it meant for the dashboard team in the paper
Firaz Peer: in October of that year, the Dean re-launched the dashboard under a nonprofit, as it opened up other sources of funding that were not available when associated with the University brand.
Firaz Peer: The dashboard went through some substantial polishing, as it was decided to retain only the modules which are fully functional.
Firaz Peer: While both the dashboards look similar the socio-technical infrastructure underlying them is different.
Firaz Peer: Where the first version of the dashboard made use of the university resources, the new one was owned by a nonprofit which meant that people and funding available to build it completely different.
Firaz Peer: As an example of kitchen's data assemblage, the dashboard did not come about according to a set plan, but rather grew in response to the environment in which it was built.
Firaz Peer: As a result the dashboard changed considerably since it was first launched. The
Firaz Peer: its underlying infrastructure, social material, and political relationships needed to be restructured to keep the dashboard alive. The
Firaz Peer: it started off as a typical data science for social good project in which students build technology modules that satisfy the community's needs. Later the dashboard evolved into an act of infrastructural bricolage,
Firaz Peer: in which the leadership team was constantly restructuring the dashboards underlying infrastructure while trying to navigate the various socio-technical challenges.
Firaz Peer: Observing how the Dean and her leadership team brought the dashboard, and its underlying infrastructure together led us to add further specificity to the work of infrastructural bricoleurs,
Firaz Peer: Analyzing the work that we did through the feminist principles of technology design that Suchman and other scholars offer,
Firaz Peer: we found that infrastructural bricoleurs operate through principles of situated knowledge, partial perspectives, limited power and located accountability.
Firaz Peer: What this means is that they work with what is materially available rather than building everything from scratch.
Firaz Peer: They distribute tasks between groups where each group has has limited power, impact and accountability, they
Firaz Peer: work across established, organizational and disciplinary boundaries, The
Firaz Peer: they collapse the temporal distinction between technology design and use to see every use situation as an opportunity for design.
Firaz Peer: They recognize the invisible labor involved in the creation, sustenance, and maintenance of such infrastructures and plan accordingly.
Firaz Peer: while we focused on the infrastructuring of a civic data dashboard, we see this way of working, being typical of individuals and teams working in resource constraint environments in general,
Firaz Peer: in terms of future work, we would love to see how the how these principles translate to building other digital and non digital infrastructures as well.
Firaz Peer: we ourselves are taking this work forward by considering what a more participatory approach to infrastructuring would look like.
Firaz Peer: I could talk more about that, but in the interest of time. I'll stop here, and i'll be happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you.