On the moral economy of digital infrastructures: Sharing, usability and publicness

Transcription

1 On the moral economy of digital infrastructures: Sharing, usability and publicness Ana Delgado TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture University of Oslo

2 Message: Digital research infrastructures Radically changing the ways in knowledge is produced and circulated This work of infrastructuring brings about a new moral economy of science: Openness

3 Open Science is new, openess in science is not XVII-XVIII- Experimental science: Public knowledge Public experiments Evidence Witnessing Disclosing methods Replicability/Reproducibility Fact-making: Truth Scientific publishing as infrastructure Paper (mobile) Peer reviewing Mediated witnessing (Cunningham, 2001) Knowledge traveling, the scientific community expanding, increasing specialization

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7 What is the crisis of reproducibility really about? Tension between transparency/efficiency Producing Truth/Producing Innovation Best practices?

8 What is the crisis of reproducibility really about? Publishing (methods, peer reviewing, results ) Crisis about the means by which scientific knowledge is produced, shared/circulates Infrastructural crisis

9 A solution: Digitalizing research methods

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11 Building open tools and infrastructures for biology: Sharing, usability, publicness

12 Open Source Biology Open source tools and infrastructures: sharing Open source mantra : Expectation That wide circulation of data & technology will prompt innovation Parallelism with history of computing science: Open tools and ways of organizing the production of knowledge will lead to a revolution In biology in the XXI century as it was in computing science in XX century.

13 Software design and engineering. Modularity & Molecular biology and biotechnology Messy and emergent biological systems Developing systems /knowing systems Open innovation/innovation by incentives? A culture of sharing / a culture of owning What is good scientific research?

14 Digitalizing Biology How is biology being digitalized? Under which assumptions? What are the implications?

15 What digital biology is NOT just another (emergent, convergent ) technology

16 New ways of knowing and new forms of knowledge infrastructures may do more than add to existing stocks of knowledge: They may rework them, reorder our sense of value and structure in the world, write new ontologies over old ones. In the process, whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable (Edwards et al. 2014). Knowledge infrastructures do not only provide new maps to known territories they reshape the geography itself (Edwards et al. 2014) Edwards, P. Jackson, S, Chalmers, M. Bowker, G. Borgman, C, Ribes, D. Burton, M and Calvert, S. Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and Research Challenges. Report. University of Michigan May, 2012

17 Digital methods are fundamentality changing ways of knowing and doing biology Represented: described, inscribed, black-boxed (data), codified Circulated in scientific communities (and beyond): push for openness Intervened: Constructive turn in biology/from reading code to building it- design (i.e. Cell and microbial factories) Biology as an App. Imaginaries of life: Modular parts Political economy of science: - Economy of expectations: Fast innovation for the bioeconomy - What type of research projects are important and prioritized - The Public: Institutions (i.e. PPP) Out of the institutions (i.e. DIYbio, massive testing and crowdsourcing, digital devices for monitoring human health and the environment )

18 Digital Life Norway Convergence for Innovation Key tool of the Norwegian Bioeconomy

19 Biology as infrastructures, tools (generic devices), and applications

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21 Digital infrastructures and tools for biology: Building future of a nation Building roads for biological data: Interoperability (ISBE, Elixir ) State taking responsibility as investor (taking the risks) Moving from raw data to value creation and to actual innovation Infrastructures need to be maintained, repair and used Sharing regimes (?) Public Private Partnerships a pool of commons (generic tools, data, Infrastructures ) that can be further developed by private capital Open Source Biology

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23 Research practices in digital biology Data storage open collections, repositories, banks Libraries Data use Modelling Simulations Design Data characterization Meta-data, annotations, Contribution Valuable data (useful)

24 Open Biology Researchers as developers/users Moral obligation to contribute and to share data for further developments Communities (making of repositories standards) Blurring of the basic/applied research distinction (scientific value/possible applications) From reproducibility to usability (crowdsourcing and crowd- testing) From producing truth to producing devices that work (function) Problem solving where biological parts can be customized to address particular problems and to produce novel and smart solutions oriented towards innovation

25 A dream of knowledge making From the encyclopedia to wikipedia Similar to the version-labeled products of software, the outputs of collaborative work are never finished in the sense that is true for most industrial goods. Bruns describes this mode of production or his Updated notion of produsage as a continuing process whose outputs are unfinished artefacts. Likewise, Clay Shirky writes, a Wikipedia article is a process, is also thought to be more successful when the work at hand can be broken down into small, discrete or demi-discrete components" Modular parts can be further modified and developed by further contributors * Tkacz, N Wikipedia and the politics of openness, University of Chicago Press

26 When researchers get involved in the production and use of digital infrastructures their ideas/ideals of what is good science may also change A new moral economy in biotechnology? Usability, sharing, publicness

27 Production of open tools and infrastructure : Biology moving out of institutions. Bio-hacking, personal genomics, DIYbio, Citizen Science Crowd-sampling and testing, Monitoring health or environmental conditions Producing smart, accessible, low cost and fun solutions Solving social problems there where state welfare structures fail

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29 Grassroots infrastructuring: Data colections

30 Dtailed project documentation: Open protocols, methods, results

31 Message: Digital research infrastructures Radically changing the ways in knowledge is produced and circulated This work of infrastructuring brings about a new moral economy. Shareability, usability, publicness