Léa Stiefel

CSCSP / IRIN.CH

This collection of articles is the second part of the special issue published by First Monday in February 2024 (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/747). The original thematic series of case studies on ‘Governance by Infrastructure’ is extended here with three new case studies, an article on methodology, and a closing commentary. Th...

Presentation at panel P318, EASST-4S 2024, Amsterdam, "Opaque APIs: biaises, blind spots, and instabilities" Limits of transparency and depths of opacity in the use of APIs in information infrastructures (IIs) Alain Sandoz, Léa Stiefel

Slides of the presentation: "Co-shaping eGov and Information Infrastructures: From Agriculture to Healthcare", Alain Sandoz (UNINE), Léa Stiefel (IRIN) at the ICEDEG Conference, Lucerne, 24-26 June 2024.

The article examines the co-shaping of eGovernment (eGov) and digital information infrastructures (IIs). A conceptual framework is proposed based on a case that unrolled in Swiss agriculture during 2017-2019. It is used to illustrate other eGov services in State-regulated sectors like business and healthcare. EGov in Swiss agriculture appeared in t...

The paper studies the relationship between infrastructures and their corresponding information infrastructures. It introduces the concept of infrastructure overlay, i.e., a generic object that encapsulates complexity within an infrastructure, and of digital chimera, i.e., for any given overlay instance, the collection of its representations in the...

While infrastructures are governed by institutions and rules, they also govern us, as social actors, by theirvery design. This special issue is dedicated to the study of the governance embedded in infrastructures, asopposed to the governance of the effects they might produce. From machine learning to artificialintelligence, from gig economy platfor...

This book provides an analysis on whether and how the current European legal framework adequately deals with personal conditions in which digital technologies might prove particularly disruptive. It furthermore assesses how the existing policies and rules could be reinterpreted, reimagined and reshaped. In doing so, it offers a remarkable symbiosis...

The paper studies the dual meaning of shared distributed functionality: at the two levels of users and of information systems. It is based on a case that unfolded in Swiss agriculture between 2017 and 2019. Three projects attempted to build a sector-wide information infrastructure. Their aim was to share sensitive agricultural data between organisa...

https://www.youtube.com/live/wVKIaJtc7Sw?feature=share&t=12591

https://www.sv.uio.no/tik/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences/2023/nordic-sts/accepted-panels.html

Call for papers (18 August 2022) Governance by Infrastructure Special issue to be published open-access by First Monday: https://firstmonday.org Papers due: 23 December 2022 Publication: Summer 2023 (see calendar below)

En 2017, un projet de plateforme d’agriculture intelligente émerge en Suisse dans le but de centraliser les données et ainsi simplifier le travail administratif des agriculteurs. Ce projet est loin de faire l'unanimité. Sur la base d'un travail de terrain mené auprès de producteurs, de fonctionnaires et de responsables d’organisations privées du se...

L'article examine la relation entre la conception des plateformes numériques et les relations de pouvoir entre les acteurs d'un secteur économique. Quand une « plateforme » induit des dépendances asymétriques au bénéfice d'un acteur privilégié, la littérature se focalise en général sur le système central qu'il contrôle et où se concentrent les flux...

Manuscrit pour le colloque international "Politiques de la machine agricole. Approches sociologiques et historiques des trajectoires de mécanisation de l'agriculture (1945-2021), Université Paris Dauphine (organisateurs: Sara Angeli Aguiton, Sylvain Brunier, Baptiste Kotras, Céline Pessis, Samuel Pinaud)

Keywords: architecture; architect’s work; design; constraints; strategy; distributed system; organizations; data sharing;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6fXypThoH0&list=PLnEc3feMzd56o5KiOLsJV7SZO21O2rKZR&index=5&ab_channel=MasterEISOIMST

The governance of the large sociotechnical systems that invisibly power and support the social world has long been a focus of STS scholars. One may recall the work of Hughes (1983) on the electrification of America, Star and Bowker (1996) on classifications and standards, or Latour (1993) on the Berlin Key. When we speak of infrastructure, and as B...

https://www.4sonline.org/80-equality-by-design-vs-design-for-appropriation-in-digital-resource-sharing/

L'article examine trois cas de numérisation de la critique qui se sont succédés entre 2015 et 2019 en réaction à diverses tentatives de concentration dans le secteur agricole suisse. Il introduit une nouvelle perspective sur la multiplicité des opérateurs et leurs relations de dépendance. La littérature se concentre sur les dépendances imposées par...

The paper examines the case of a peer-to-peer platform intended to enable the exchange of private data between database operators. It argues that the case has some design features associated with commons and shows in particular how a governance structure is embedded in the technical architecture. This observation argues in favor of a specificity of...

Studying care through infrastructure The “manual labourers” of a hospital-based biobank As part of the field of research of so-called “infrastructure studies” established by the science and technology sociologist Susan Leigh Star, this paper proposes to penetrate behind the scenes of a specific infrastructure, a hospital-based biobank, and to foll...