Human Social Dynamics: Interoperability Strategies for Scientific Cyberinfrastructure: The Comparative Interoperability Project ( ) initiates a situated social and organizational comparison of three scientific information infrastructures deploying different approaches to data interoperability. While the issue of interoperability remains addressed primarily as a technical one – e.g. in terms of a strategic choice of technical standard for data coding (e.g. classifications, metadata, ontology), we consider interoperability strategies as specific configurations of technical commitment, community involvement, and organizational structure. These strategies, implicit or explicit in project visions, represent a critical factor in subsequent development. In other words, while deploying a particular interoperability strategy in terms of technical direction, an information infrastructure project also unfolds strategies of community mobilization and organizational arrangement. Cyberinfrastructure is the coordinated aggregate of software, hardware and other technologies, as well as human expertise, required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering. The challenge of cyberinfrastructure is to integrate relevant and often disparate resources to provide a useful, usable, and enabling framework for research and discovery characterized by broad access and “end-to-end” coordination. *Final Report: NSF SBE-CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences”, F. Berman and H. Brady, available at Interoperability includes a broad range of work, including coordinating collaborations between diverse expert communities, building consensus on technical directions, securing consent from the domain, aligning interfaces with already existing community practices or training user populations. This kind of work is common to even the most technically centered interoperability endeavor, but it remains difficult to credit this crucial work and often remains beyond discursive capacity of a community. Interoperability is the unproblematic movement of data and information across time, hardware/software, visualization, disciplines necessary for reuse of data and integration of information. Achieving data interoperability is understood here as a process that aims at information assemblage and sharing in order to enable reuse by various people, across diverging disciplines and across long periods of time. *Initial Report: Comparative Interoperability Project: Configurations of Community, Technology, Organization. D.Ribes, K.S.Baker, F.Millerand, and G.C.Bowker. Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Available at Our research does not seek to produce a new sphere of ‘social action’ within cyberinfrastructure but rather to identify and enable action within already existing socio-technical work. Our research approach makes use of the analytical frames of grounded theory and action research drawing on methods of ethnography and collaborative design. Our study makes use of ethnographic methods such as interviews, document analysis, participant observation, and community collaboration in order to develop a comparative perspective through cross case analysis (Strauss, 1987). We seek an expanded vocabulary for interoperability of data and communities as well as for the roles of technology and participants supporting information environments. We use our particular project configuration of interdisciplinary participants to address interoperability strategies and seek opportunities to contribute to the communities with which we work. We present examples here of work done in collaboration with the communities with which we work. The CIP project considers a collaborative interdisciplinary team as both an interoperability strategy. The collaborative participants and communities are requisite for posing as well as addressing contemporary cyberinfrastructure issues. Our team purposely includes science studies, historian of science, sociology, communication studies, environmental science, information management, and communities of practice expertise. GEON is a cyberinfrastructure for the US geo-sciences aimed at providing scientific data and resource sharing services to a broad range of disciplines to ensure a more integrated picture of earth processes (Keller, 2003). LTER is a federated network of biome sites with an information infrastructure for ecological sciences that aims at enabling inter-disciplinary collaboration and preserving data for the long-term (Hobbie et al., 2003). Ocean Informatics is a nascent initiative for the ocean sciences based at UCS Scripps Institution of Oceanography that aims at providing a set of resources including shared scientific data and a design environment for learning, tool sharing and participatory design (Baker et al, 2005). Florence Millerand LCHC/Science Studies University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093, USA David Ribes Sociology/Science Studies University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093, USA Karen S. Baker Scripps Institution of Oceanography University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA USA Geoffrey C. Bowker Center for Science, Technology & Society Santa Clara University Santa Clara, CA USA Introduction Concepts, Methods, and Team Three case studies Care with framing the questions Care with framing the approaches Considering interoperability strategies & cyberinfrastructure While deploying interoperability strategies (as technical direction, community mobilization, and organizational structure) scientists, technologists, data and information managers are actively engaged in definition and design, so that a major part of their work consists precisely in the stabilization of these distributions, embedding them into technical artifacts, organizational arrangements and community representatives. An understanding of cyberinfrastructure as a process in addition to configurations allows for an analysis with a multi-dimensional understanding of its dynamic features. Care with the units of analysis In summary: there is a need for articulation work The Value of Technologist-Social Scientist Partnerships Why Technologists Need Social Scientists & / or Why Social Scientists Need Technologists Science Today is Technology-enabled Science Today is Collaboration-enabled Long-term Sociotechnical View “EML is successful since it has been adopted by the IT and domain science community.” (The developers point of view) “EML is not yet successful since it requires local re-development activities.” (The enactors point of view) Care with multiple stories Particular technical solutions bring particular cognitive divisions of labor. On tologies in GEON are creating interfaces between domain scientist representatives and information technologists while metadata wihin LTER creates interfaces between information managers and domain scientists. Traditional Technical View Long-term Sociotechnical View Traditional Technical View Long-term Sociotechnical View Traditional Technical View Long-term Sociotechnical View Traditional Technical View With strategic use of collaborative design, a mutually informative dynamic is created influencing practices of social science and environmental science - an alternative to more traditional concepts of intervention. BDEI HSD Social Informatics Infrastructuring