The Promise of (Alternative) Platforms for (Alternative) Information Infrastructures

Abstracts

Shaping technical infrastructures for inter-organizational collaboration: when meta-organizations decide to take action

Louis Cousin, Laval University; with Luc K. Audebrand

The democratization of information technologies (IT) has supported a mushrooming of inter-organizational information systems (IOIS), i.e. structures of inter-organizational collaborations supported by automated data exchange and processing systems. IOIS rely on technical infrastructures, whose characteristics embed choices resulting from power relations and representations of existing and envisioned structure of collaboration (Volkoff et al., 2007). Notably, technical infrastructures’ characteristics set foundations for resource distribution (e.g.: who controls the data) and levels of standardization (e.g.: which processes must an organization adopt in order to benefit from an IOIS) among an ecosystem of organizations (Rodón & Sesé, 2010). IOIS projects often involve meta-organizations, i.e. organizations whose members are themselves organizations (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005). As providers of cultural structures for inter-organizational collaboration (Spillman, 2018), meta-organizations actively participate in shaping, maintaining, and sometimes aborting IOIS projects (Rodón & Sesé, 2010; Scott & Zachariadis, 2012; Steinfield et al., 2005): SWIFT is an example of a distributed banking IOIS (and a meta-organization) which emerged in reaction to a centralized IOIS project (Scott & Zachariadis, 2012). However, management literature is yet to have identified mechanisms explaining meta-organizations strategies towards IOIS project. Our paper aims to reveal factors influencing meta-organizations’ perceptions, and propose configuration of factors explaining meta-organizations’ strategies towards IOIS projects. The research consists in a realist literature review (Paré et al., 2015) complemented with a single nested case study (Yin, 2014) analysing the evolving strategies conducted by a North American meta-organization of non-profit watershed organizations, and which led to a centralized IOIS for geomatic data.

Data governance in the making: The Case of Genevan and Parisian Uber drivers

Jessica Pidoux, CEE Sciences Po Paris, Director PersonalData.iO; with Paul-Olivier Dehaye & Jacob Gursky

The article situates the process of data governance in an empirical case study of gig workers in Paris, France and the State of Geneva, Switzerland taking control of their personal data that is collected by the platform Uber. It is an ethnographic account of the experience of researchers/activists, who are members of an NGO, supporting civil society to exercise their data rights. We analyse how personal data governance emerged as an imperative practice for Uber drivers within infrastructures where they are able to negotiate the calculation of their working time by means of three mediations: redefining an app-based service and gig workers’ status; recovering personal data; analysing it. Our results contribute to drawing three definitions of data in the gig economy: data is power, data is knowledge, data is governance.

Alternative Rituals behind Public Service Platform Development: The Case of ARD Online Media Libraries

Maryam Tatari, Technical University of Munich

This paper discusses the development of one of Germany’s public service media’s online libraries – ARD Audiothek and ARD Mediathek – as a case of alternative platform development. Since the early 2010s, ARD has been vouching for developing new ways of audience engagement and reclaiming its position in content creation and distribution in Germany. On its way to achieving these goals, it tries to display its commitment to the public values it stands for while developing its online media libraries. However, the development is far from rational market-driven platform development, particularly when it comes to exploiting user data and the financial performance of the platforms. 

Nevertheless, this alternative approach to development does not remain at this level. Instead, in a condition that we named “collaboration”, it rejected many links to its predecessor federalist structure of public service broadcasting, engaged its regional members in the development process, and offered opportunities for intervention and negotiation to various user groups. We aim to ask what are the different rituals taking place within collaboration and who the involved actors are. What kind of power structure do they configure? Furthermore, how – and if – are these rituals shaping an alternative platform development at the end? To answer these questions, we will bring empirical insights from 15 semi-structured expert interviews (managers, developers, and journalists involved in the platforms’ development) conducted between April and November 2021.

Migration to Alternative Platforms as Techno-Cultural Transitions

Giorgos Zoukas, National an Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of History and Philosophy of Science 

Issues concerning the freedom of expression through centralized online communication platforms, as well as the safety of sensitive or personal data provided by their users, seem to be more relevant than ever nowadays. This is especially so in view of the discourse which has emerged after Twitter’s purchase by Elon Musk and which involves, among other themes, the migration to decentralized platforms, with Mastodon constituting one of the most notable examples of them. Drawing on a recently completed two-year postdoctoral research on the history of the appropriation of the Internet by communities of environmental scientists, and informed by the current discussions, particularly among scholars, surrounding the possibilities of decentralized platforms, this working paper explores the different factors behind users’ migration to such platforms, generally regarded as alternative to the GAFAM and those similar to them. Based on the qualitative analysis of interview data, as well as the examination of archived and online material deriving primarily from blogs and email lists, this paper focuses on the rise and decline of Usenet, a decentralized and distributed communication network launched in the late 1970s, and critically compares it to the recent case of user migration from Twitter to Mastodon. The main argument put forward is that platform migration can be best comprehended in terms of techno-cultural transitions, that is, transitions resulting from the interplay among different social, economic, political, and indeed cultural and technological factors, ultimately revealing not any superiority of new/alternative platforms over old/mainstream ones, but rather different paradigms of communication.

Organizers 

Léa Stiefel, Lausanne University, CHUV (lea.stiefel@unil.ch) 
Alain Sandoz, University of Neuchâtel (alain.sandoz@unine.ch)