Data as Infrastructure – Infrastructuring for Data Analytics

The internet has long been a core infrastructure especially for the western societies. In the last decade, the usage of the internet changed from a mainly communication infrastructure giving mainly access to static information to become a platform to full-scale applications implemented as services. Even more recently we can observe a growing use of the internet to collect and provide data: social media platforms and search engines collect, use and sell data about their usage and users; online shops use data to recommend goods to the buyer; municipalities and other public organisations provide data through open data interfaces so it can be used by companies, e.g. to provide advice for car drivers searching for a parking lot. The data infrastructure making data accessible, though, requires IT expertise.
In this position paper we explore the implication of this development from a participatory design perspective and argue that we need to engage in infrastructuring in order to make the common data a common good.