Reconfiguring Data Relations: Institutional Dynamics around Data in Local Governance

DOI

Data infrastructures are major sites through which city government operates and therefore of special interest to critical scholars of technology. Yet ways that these infrastructures are embedded into the institutional fabric of government make them difficult to navigate and often resistant to abstract critique and generalized analysis. We present an ethnographic study of a design effort launched by a team inside a city government to build and deploy a tool with a specific focus on equity and justice. By integrating data from multiple sources and bringing it together in a spatial framework, the team sought to bring neighborhood voices, often marginalized in planning efforts, into the center of the conversation. Tracing the negotiations over data's value in this process, we unveil various tensions involved in this effort, within and between different groups, and how the group of city employees navigated these tensions, mainly by adjusting the relations of the groups around data -- which we call "data relations." Narratives in organizational communications were key in both revealing and mobilizing the data relations constituting the institutional data infrastructure. With the empirical findings, we argue that tracing the data relations can be an effective way for the CSCW community to understand the institutional data politics and make interventions in the systems in power.