Reimagining Data Infrastructures through Infrastructural Inversion and Participatory Design

• In Event: Politics and Infrastructures of Data Collaboratives

Abstract

Many cities and non-profit organizations are building data infrastructures like indicator dashboards in the hope that it will help their communities be more engaged in issues of common concern. Such efforts are predicated on the assumption that citizens are data literate enough to analyze the data and generate insights on their own. The Communities Who Know (CWK) Data Dashboard was one such infrastructure built by Georgia Tech in partnership with civic organizations to support community organizers, researchers, city officials and others in their civic engagement efforts. My ethnographic investigation revealed that in addition to data literacy, community leaders need to overcome several other socio-technical, political and cultural obstacles before they can use data infrastructures like the CWK dashboard towards their civic end goals.
I interviewed key stakeholders within the university and community organizations to understand how the dashboard was conceptualized and developed. I also organized data literacy workshops for community leaders to address their need to understand how the dashboard could be used. These workshops brought attention to the moments of infrastructural breakdown that came about when using the CWK dashboard, which will be the focus of my talk. I will highlight issues like accountability, trust and empowerment that surfaced through these moments of infrastructural breakdown and the opportunities they offer to redesign the dashboard infrastructure. In combining the STS approach of infrastructural inversion with design, I hope to offer the STS community a methodology they can use to reimagine data infrastructures using participatory design processes.

Authors

• Firaz Peer, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology