The Need for a Book on Information Infrastructure Development

In the same way that infrastructures such as transportation, electricity, sewerage, and water supply are widely assumed to be integrators of urban spaces (Graham & Marvin, 2001), information infrastructures such as national health information networks and online social networks are assumed to be integrators of information spaces. Interest in information infrastructure development grew with the advent of the Internet and the popu-larization of computing technologies (Gross, 1986), and was later further promoted through government-led plans towards the creation of national and international information infrastructures (NTIA, 1993; Bangemann et al., 1994). Information infrastructures have since been conceptualized as pyramidal IT portfolios towards better investments for strategic business-IT alignment (Weill & Broadbent, 1998), open, heterogeneous information systems (Hanseth, 2001), or as ecologies of distributed and often conflicting social and technological systems (Bowker & Star, 1999). Despite this variation of perspectives, most researchers tend to agree that an information infrastructure emerges in time through negotiations between diverse groups and individuals directly involved in its development. These negotiation processes have been called " the deal-making processes " between stronger and weaker stakeholder groups (Weill & Broadbent, 1998), " involved socio-technical negotiations " (Monteiro, 2001), and " practical politics " (Bowker & Star, 1999). Recent research (Sahay et al., 2009) has highlighted the different sets of actors (both small and large) whose negotiations are significant to understand the how and why of configuring information infrastructures–i.e. their ability to adapt, interconnect, co-evolve, and integrate. In this research, it is argued that actors have little choice but to align their new information systems with the existing institutions' agendas, practices, and routines (also see Braa et al., 2004; Chilundo & Aanestad, 2005). Despite these developments concerning the importance of negotiations in the development of information infrastructures, it has been argued that further work is needed to better understand " why and how negotiations occur " (Sahay et al., 2009, pp.402). In particular, there is a need to understand how contradictions and contestations around the development of an information infrastructure actually become negotiated. This need is particularly evident now with the advent of Web 2.0 and new types of information in-frastructures, from online social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Second Life, to free and open