Infrastructures from the bottom-up and the top-down: can they meet in the middle?

Abstract

Based on a study of participatory design in the development of cyberinfrastructure involving the rapid composition of open source software and web services, we consider cases where researchers create their own ad hoc infrastructures out of available software. We compare 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' cyberinfrastructure development and speculate on whether the two approaches can be productively combined.