Download Call - the Comparative Interoperability Project

Interoperability: Beyond Standards
Organizers: David Ribes and Geof Bowker
Participants: Les Gasser, Florence Millerand, Hamid Ekbia, Christine Borgman,
David Ribes, Lyn Headley, Casper Bruun Jensen
Discussants: Susan Leigh Star, Geof Bowker
Session I – Analyzing Interoperability
Standards and standardization has emerged as a central theme in STS. In a number of
scientific domains, however, the most challenging issues are how to move beyond
standards within a discipline so as to federate knowledge across multiple disciplines, each
with their own evolving sets of data standards, institutional frameworks and technical
infrastructures. The problem is not simply technical, organizational or theoretical: the it
is a strategic problem of how to work the sociotechnical field such that new
conversations are possible which reflect the complexity of the real world issues being
analysed (global climate change, species loss and so forth).
In this session we bring together empirical studies from a number of interoperability
endeavors. We ask, what can the already well developed study of standards and
standardization contribute to the study of alternate strategies of interoperability? What
kind of work and organization is specific to each sociotechnical solution? With differing
configurations of technology, who and what is left out, silenced or spoken for?
Session II – Interventions
Producing working standards, and more general interoperability, is considered by actors
themselves to be a highly involved, delicate work which is often politicized. In short,
interoperability work is often already seen as ‘social’. This framing has opened an
opportunity for the participation of science and technology studies in the creation of
standards, metadata languages, ontologies, ‘best practices,’ and other solutions to the
problem of interoperability. But within STS intervention – the contribution of the analyst
to the field of action – itself remains a controversial and under-explored subject.
In this second session we bring together the experiences of STS practitioners who in the
course of their empirical research or in an independent capacity, have also been
participants, contributors or consultants in interoperability endeavors.
We ask, what level of engagement is possible in these projects? Our panel draws on a
range of positions, from embedded participant observers to a distanced roles as
evaluators. What can we contribute to the development of interoperability? Interventions
can range from offering resources for framing action and design enhancements to critical
stances on exclusions, black-boxes or marginalization. Similarly the methodologies of
intervention are varied from participatory design, to written feedback. What are the
possible consequences for STS, the interevened, and/ or broader collectives? And of
course, there is are seemingly inescapable questions of subject/object relations.