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table of contents
| Infrastructure Type | Descriptiona | Control point for access to or use (e.g., identify the owner, regulator, manager, etc. as appropriate)b | Open Source, Open Access, or Public Resource/Utilityc | Proprietaryc | How heavily used?d | Reliabilityd | Satisfaction for Userd | Ethical concerns (known or possible) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Land infrastructure (e.g., properties ceded, unceded, public, private, etc.) Include only principal land infrastructures. | Country: The Netherlands | Identity of the owner and position in key relationships enabling the gaining of citizenship (kinship, employment, status as resident never arrested nor convincted of offense) | Not Applicable | Yes | 10 | 10 | 8 | Privileges of mobility afforded to holders of Dutch passports are significant | |
| Materials infrastructure (e.g., notable common or rare extracted or other materials used in research, production, and communication). Break down by notable materials used in devices or tools if appropriate. | There are issues of material resources used to produce the tools of our work. Clearly, extractions issues are deserving of attention. In addition, there are material impacts of the circulation and transport of these materials, as materials need to be sourced, refined and shipped. There are also associated issues of pollution and toxicity, connected to the afterlife of material infrastructures. Laptop and phone most likely contain heavy metals like cadmium, antimony, and lead, and plastic casing often contains flame retardants. These are all potentially harmful if not disposed of well—and it seems that most ewaste is not dealt with in ways that might avoid or minimize toxic effects, since less than 20% according to the World Health Organization: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electronic-waste-(e-waste) | Regulatory bodies have an important role to play both in regulating resource extraction and disposal, but also in enforcing principles of reparability and fighting planned obsolecence and inability to replace batteries. Universities could also decide to source their equipment ethically and seek to support more 'circula’ approaches to the equipment they buy (my institution is exploring this with regard to office furniture). | Not Applicable | Yes | 10 | ||||
| Energy infrastructure (e.g., principal energy sources & infrastructure used in research, production, and communication) | Fossil-free in both work locations. At home via local renewable energy provided by energy coop and solar panels on roof and fossil-free energy at university office located in first natural gas free educational buidling in the Netherlands. | Personal for home office; institutional for office at university | Not Applicable | Yes | |||||
| Transportation infrastructure (e.g., private or public transportation needed for daily or research trips) | Cycling or walking to station on bike paths or sidewalk. Regional train networks to travel from residence in Groningen to Campus Fryslân. | Largely up to my own decisions about what kind of transportation I want to embrace; availability of public transport options are up to regional government policy. | Not Applicable | Yes | 8 | 8 | 10 | ||
| Architectural infrastructure (e.g., buildings, labs, rooms) | Home office in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands and Beurs building housing faculty in Leeuwarden. Flexible workspaces are increasingly common, though senior staff have been 'spared' so far. | Personal for home office; institutional for office at university. | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | |||||
| Civic, community, national, or regional infrastructure (e.g. provided by cities, communities, governments, etc.) | Universities are public institutions in the Netherlands, so there is a strong entwinement of the institution with civic life and government policies. The extreme right agenda being implemented in 2024 is putting strong pressures on Dutch universities and leading to mobilization of academic communities. | Government; board of universities. | Yes | Not Applicable | |||||
| Institutional infrastructure (e.g., equipment, services, and "overhead" or “indirect cost recovery” items for grants to universities) | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | |||||||
| Labor infrastructure (e.g., type & amount of labor from collaborators, staff, research assistants; include any attributes that seem important, such as unrecognized, unpaid, low-paid, outsourced, or other attributes of labor) | The mutual support and stimulation of the research group. Knowledge infrastructures are sites of intellectual, social and emotional labor. | Hiring is via institution, but mutuality is very much a group project, fed by example from group chair and reinforced through exchange practices and interactions in research meetings. | Yes | Yes | 10 | 8 | 8 | ||
| Research-content infrastructure (e.g., physical libraries and archives, online research materials, shadow libraries, etc.) | Web-based repositories of my university, the interoperability of this system with libraries and repositories worldwide and platforms that support interaction with scholarly sources (Zotero) are essential to this work. | Institutional. | Yes | Yes | 10 | 9 | 9 | open movement has made major changes, but still a long way to go, as publishers have largely shifted their business model to see open access as their new cash cow | |
| Tools infrastructure (e.g., principal analog tools and digital tools, scripts, or protocols used for research, writing, communication, production) (excluding high-performance computing, for which see below) | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | |||||||
| Networked Platforms infrastructure (e.g., major networked or cloud platforms used for research, storage, analysis, sharing, communication, publication—e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS, etc.) (excluding high-performance computing, for which see below) | File sharing platform: Surfdrive | Institutional access via universities to Surf, which is a national service for all institutions of higher education in the Netherlands. | Yes | Not Applicable | 10 | 5 | 5 | ||
| High-performance computing infrastructure (here defined expansively to include the use not just of supercomputers and computer clusters or grids but any high-performance computing infrastructure or special GPU and other processors exceeding the capabilities of an individual workstation, laptop, or server. | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | Not Applicable | ||||||
| Other infrastructure | Not Applicable | Not Applicable |
This infrastructure manifest was completed by Anne Beaulieu and reports on Chapter 1, “Interfaces for the Anthropocene.”