The Work of Infrastructural Bricoleurs in Building Civic Data Dashboards

Abstract

The Historic Westside Universities Alliance Data Dashboard was created to meet the data equity needs of a group of resource-constrained communities in the Westside neighborhoods of Atlanta. We observed the development of this dashboard by participating as ethnographers and developers of its public safety module. Our ethnography and subsequent situational analysis of the dashboard's infrastructuring process led us to the work that individual stakeholders do in bringing such a dashboard to fruition. These stakeholders, whom we call infrastructural bricoleurs, operate through principles of situated knowledge, partial perspectives, limited power, and located accountability. Our analysis, which builds on concepts of infrastructures, bricolage, and feminist principles of technology design, helps us add further specificity to the work that infrastructural bricoleurs need to do when building civic data dashboards with resource constrained communities. Our findings benefit other researchers studying data infrastructures as well as administrators and practitioners within programs like DSSG (Data Science for Social Good) who are interested in building data infrastructures under similar constraints.