Making sense of the data infrastructure community map

Bruce Becker
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Splendid Isolation

Building something is easy when you’re doing it for yourself. You get to make all the decisions, and execute all the tasks, bound only by your own limits. Just focus on that burning idea in your head, and do it. However, as soon as you have to build together. Then, things get a little tricky.

Data infrastructure is one of those tricky things. In terms of mere complexity and scale, it’s not what one would call a “pet project” — good infrastructure is built for and is usable by the widest possible group of people. This implies a certain amount of consideration into what gets built. It may help to add more people to the project, to speed things up… but that may complicate how things get built. It also doesn’t address why things get built or done in the way that they are.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s not the scale or complexity of the technology that makes it so difficult, but rather that of the community. Doing things with people is different to doing them for people. Projects become ecosystems. and making sure that one has a coherent understanding of the implications of any particular action down the line requires a fine understanding of the subtle connections in that ecosystem. Making sense of this community — especially how you or others fit into it — can be confusing, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Community and connections

During the Sci-GaIA Final Conference, we had a presentation from Mario Marais, on “Commmunal Sensemaking using Social Mapping”

.“Communal Sensemaking via Social Mapping”, Mario Marais, Sci-GaIA Festival of Open Science. doi: 10.15169/sci-gaia:1491230378.61

This presentation inspired and educated me about how one could slowly build up a picture of the relationships, connections and other features of an ecosystem of stakeholders, and eventually make sense of it. Mario demonstrated how Kumu could be used to enrich the nodes and metadata of the network. Mapping tools like Kumu can really help to visualise the shape of a social network, as well as many more aspects besides.

Making sense

Now, I have recently started working in the data infrastructure community. As a newcomer, I have a lot of catching up to do, to make sense of what I’m being asked to do, how it impacts others, and vice-versa. One of the exciting developments which has recently started was the Figshare pilot, announced during a few workshops held across the country. As developer of the infrastructure which eventually needs to inter-operate with these repositories, I need to know which institutes are participating, who is involved, and what state the deployment is in.

Sure, I could have spent the rest of my life sending emails around, but…

How bout we never manage data over email again ?

This information — these connections and meaning and context — that’s all data. Precious data. I want to do data things to it, like preserve it, protect it, version control it, analyse it, use it to tell stories to convince people of things I don’t even know yet.

I want to make sure this data is there for future me, but also for everyone else in the ecosystem, so that they can help make sense of it, improve, add to and correct it, as we go.


Never Alone

There’s an internet meme which people use to express their solitude and sadness in a hyperconnected world. It’s particularly tragic when, in a sea of potential collaborators, we feel isolated and disconnected. There is a natural tendency amongst many people to see connections, and a temptation to connect the dots. However that internet meme also expresses a kind of subtle acceptance of the disconnected status quo. We simply cannot afford to ignore the connections that exist between us.

It is inevitable that subjective impressions are created (does this person really connect to that project ? In what way, specifically, does this person interact with this person ?) so we need to be careful in constructing such community maps. It’s very easy to misrepresent others, and indeed to create a distorted view of reality.

A community map for data infrastructure people in South Africa — work in progress.

As you can see, I started with the simple spoke-like map of the Figshare pilot implementation in South Africa. Each participating institute got a representative (which I gleaned from an email chain). This immediately allowed me to start adding metadata to enrich the nodes, such as the node type (person, institute or project), as well as relationship type (e.g. employed by, directs, advisor to, funds, etc).

This map immediately answered the one question I had had —

How is the figshare project linked to DIRISA?

Answer : through Xolani Nkosi ! Note that this is a person, but also a node in a complex network.

Next question: Where are you ?

This map doesn’t have to be perfect immediately — it can and should evolve. But now everyone with an interest, or a connection to data infrastructure in South Africa or our region can stake and claim their place.

I look forward to making sense of this jungle together.

)

Bruce Becker

Written by

ex volleyball freak and physicist. Infrastructure guy. Skeptic. African. Islander. dad. Open Everything

🛠️ Building Data-Intensive Research Initiative for South Africa

Stories about data infrastructure and communities, from South Africa

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