Civic Data at the Seams

Paper Title

Civic Data at the Seams

Publication Info

• Topic area: Civic data production and maintenance in heterogeneous sociotechnical systems.
• Keywords: Civic data, seamful spaces, environmental justice, participatory science, community-based organizations, data maintenance, alignment, misalignment, power dynamics, infrastructure.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Civic data projects often operate across heterogeneous technical, social, and institutional infrastructures, leading to misalignments and breakdowns over time. Prior work has not sufficiently addressed the temporal and political dimensions of these seamful spaces.
• Significance: Understanding and managing these seamful spaces is critical for enabling long-term sustainability, equitable collaborations, and effective civic data production in community-based organizations (CBOs).
• Motivation and related work: Previous research has explored seamfulness in sociotechnical systems and the challenges of data work in CBOs, but gaps remain in understanding the maintenance and decay of alignments over time and the role of power dynamics in seamful spaces. This paper builds on these discussions by examining a five-year civic data project, UrbanHeatATL.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The paper uses the concept of seams as an analytical lens to study the maintenance, breakdown, and strategic use of alignments in the UrbanHeatATL project, which maps urban heat islands for environmental justice.
• Novelty:
  1. Provides a detailed empirical account of civic data work in seamful spaces.
  2. Identifies three forces of infrastructural change—product evolution, personnel turnover, and institutional change—that cause alignments to decay over time.
  3. Offers recommendations for equitable collaboration and sustainable design in seamful spaces.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Ethnographic observation over two years, including participation in team meetings, data processing, and community engagement.
  • Analysis of four key misalignments in the UrbanHeatATL project to understand the causes, impacts, and resolutions of breakdowns.
  • Examination of the role of seams in negotiating power and membership within the project.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Alignments in seamful spaces decay over time due to product evolution (e.g., app updates), personnel turnover (e.g., loss of access to tools), and institutional changes (e.g., removal of government data portals).
  • Misalignments can also be strategically maintained to exert control, as seen when the nonprofit partner limited public access to data to assert community ownership.
• Advantage over baselines: Highlights the agency and power dynamics at the seams of civic data projects, moving beyond prior work that focused primarily on technical interoperability or seamless design.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Case studies of four misalignments in UrbanHeatATL, including breakdowns caused by technical updates, team turnover, and political shifts.
  • Analysis of how these misalignments were navigated and repaired, emphasizing the interplay of technical, social, and institutional factors.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The findings are based on a single case study, which may limit generalizability.
  • Future work should explore proactive strategies for managing seamful decay and designing equitable alignments in other civic data contexts.

Summary

This paper examines the UrbanHeatATL project to explore how civic data work operates in seamful spaces where multiple infrastructures intersect. It identifies three forces—product evolution, personnel turnover, and institutional change—that cause alignments to decay over time, necessitating ongoing maintenance and repair. The study also highlights how seams can be strategically leveraged to assert power and control, offering insights into the political and temporal dimensions of civic data production. The findings emphasize the need for proactive, equitable design and collaboration strategies to sustain long-term civic data initiatives.