Civic Data Field Team Description

Civic data infrastructure supports collaborative knowledge production and shared, adaptive governance of complex problems. The Austin Anthropocene campus focuses our attention on the politics of environmental data and energy transition. Our goal is not only to identify data incapacities but to design against them through experimental archiving practices that link communities to academics in new ways (Fortun et al 2016).

The theme essay on civic infrastructure offers participants further empirically oriented prompts that ask how (civic) technologies shape Austin as an anthropocenic location. Further, the essay is an attempt to analyze existing ways for “informating” the environment (Fortun 2004), as well as in specific problem domains (ecology, environmental epidemiology, energy transition or climate change adaptation, etc.).

A key goal of the campus will be to focus on data expertise and capacity of the local collaborators (or the "EXDU" layer of the scalar analytics). Together, we will concentrate on the following levels of expertise:

• Building data culture
• Building the backend
• Engineering Software
• Designing Data Models / Platforms
• Pulling Data
• Creating Data
• Rescuing Data
• Building Data Nets
• Unpacking Algorithms
• Collaborating and Interpreting
• Performing Data