more on infrastructure
Tracey’s talking more about infrastructure. It’s very good that she is.
As I mentioned on her blog, I hate the idea calling communications infrastructure “cyberinfrastructure”, “second-order infrastructure”, “virtual infratructure” or anything of that ilk, and I’m even somewhat uncomfortable with “information infrastructure” - just because it differentiates from all other forms of infrastructure and therefore allows for discrimination. Not that Tracey was necessarily proposing any of those terms, just reporting on her readings. I’m working on a network neutrality project and while reading about p2p networks and overselling found the concept of overlay networks - kind of similar but from the comp eng field.
An overlay network is a computer network which is built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network. For example, many peer-to-peer networks are overlay networks because they run on top of the Internet. Dial-up Internet is an overlay upon the telephone network.
it goes on. And I don’t like it either as a framework for communications infra.
I was talking to a civil engineer the other day and she was talking about how infrastructures are ordered in their world. I forget how she divided them up but it was another totally different way of conceiving of infrastructures.
Doc Searls is trying to work through arguments about telco infrastructure (in the recent linux journal - 2 months till it’s publicly available) and how it should be considered a public utility. Great article, but slightly muddy thinking. We need help in how to start to frame and present this issue as an infrastructure issue. My presentations recently have been on that (in italy and more recently in Toronto) and it will be the subject of my next few presentations. Here’s another article by him on telecom infrastructure being like linux and there’s one other one that I have to find.
And the CWIRP people were in town a few days ago. They’re the most recent academic group studying us. I made sure to talk to them about this and encourage them to pursue this topic because I don’t necessarily have the tools and Tracey probably doesn’t have the time to focus on this. Prof. Barbara Crow has been wrestling with mobile phone policy for a couple of years with ISF’s earlier partner MDCN and it’s very easy to communicate with her about any of this stuff.
I’ve been thinking this for a while now - since oct 2005 when I came back from the london wsfii. My comments then were on the 3d web, and they extend to calendaring infrastructure to civic information infrastructure and the rest. I still believe what I said in that email to the wsfii crowd - that we have to protext *every layer* of the infrastructure. And not just the OSI layers, but all the different application layers that depend upon each other. This is why I’m a hata’ of stuff like second life and the centralization of data.
Maybe it will turn out that infrastructure isn’t the right way to push this argument - but so far i think it’s pretty hot.
Two quotes in her post that I really like - one by the report that Tracey was reading and one by Tracey.
“the tendency to build first and ask questions later, or to treat the technical “code and wires” core as the realest or most essential thing about infrastructure, and the rest as social add-on - that has too frequently defined and limited the work of infrasructural development (p.29).”
and by tracey
“Community wireless infrastructures provide an opportunity to learn by doing infrastructure”.
more later.