Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk on “Between the Worlds: Infrastructures, Standards and Platforms of Fiscal Data” at a workshop on Digital Platforms and Boundary Infrastructures at the University of Siegen. The abstract for the talk is copied below.

This talk will examine the social life of public data infrastructures online – with a particular focus on how different actors attempt to contest, challenge, shape, intervene and participate around them. It will explore how these infrastructures cut across and undergird different social worlds, enabling different styles of reasoning and modes of experience through public data. Focusing on transnational initiatives to integrate and harmonise information around public spending, contracting and tax, it will look at different competing visions and emerging actors around the standards, governance and infrastructures of public data online. On the one hand it will draw attention to different ways of organising public data worlds – from platforms inspired by technology companies to other distributed practices of assembling and aligning data inspired by open source software development. On the other hand it will examine their world-making capacities, reflecting different conceptions of the relationships between states and markets, companies and citizens.