Cyberinfrastructure as a Public Good

I leapt out of the car when I saw this shortlived ad campaign (unfortuunately timed to coincide with 9/11) on a mildly dilapidated building near Berkeley.  What with bridges falling down in Minnesota and general handwringing about the state of our national infrastructure it's been on my mind some lately. 

How do you convince folks that infrastructure is important in a country where the concept of 'public goods' seems to be so demode?  Public goods require public money - all of our lives are made better because of them, but no-one quite wants to pay.  John King made a great point in conversation the other day about cyberinfrastructure (the networking of computers, people and objects in such a way as to facilitate genuinely new forms of learning, discovery and play) - he pointed out that when we built the highway system in America it was taken for granted that taxes would be used as the basis for building what was once a wonderful Interstate highway system.  Now we are trying to build cyberinfrastructure on the relative cheap - without providing adequate funding to really make it so.  The benefits are really obvious - enabling students from throughout the country who normally would not have access to scientific laboratories to manipulate telescopes, take part in environmental planning; enabling researchers from minority serving institutions to enter into rich research collaborations from which they are now excluded; exponentially increasing citizen participation in science so that important environmental data gathering and policy making can be truly democratic and so forth ....  .  But then again, so are the benefits of high speed rail links between major hubs across America, of low cost and efficient point to point public transport and so forth.

In general, the way that 'public good' gets spelled out right now is in terms of 'national competitiveness' - the 'only sustainable edge' (as John Seely Brown puts it) in a flat world being training and supporting knowledge workers.  There's something very like this going on in the world of biodiversity right now - you don't sell the wonders of nature, you sell what we might be losing economically in terms of crop losses, fragile environments etc.  This is a way Procrustean bed to fit a public good argument into.  Let's change the terms of the discussion so that a negative turn (economic threats) becomes a positive agenda.

Comments

[Keith Warner OFM]

Don't you love the fact that "caliente" (= hot in Spanish) is hanging over the infrastructure ads?!? Global climate disruption threatens most all of the environmental infrastructure we have (think levees, bridges, roads....) but the ads are trying to motivate people to care about what we have now, even as our increasingly dynamic climate threatens it further...