science, technology and the societies (cultures) they create

Back in August of last year, I wrote a blog that aimed to collect (or at least jumpstart) some personal reflections about Community Management, a year on in my role with The Turing Way.

Scientific research is not the same as technological development – their cultures, norms, and practices are different. But it took me a while to understand this.

I first approached this kind of work from the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and as an ethnographer. STS is an interdisciplinary field that emerged in the interwar period when historians, sociologists, and scientists took a growing interest in understanding how science and technology was influencing society.

Since completing my MA, I have moved from ethnographer to practitioner. When I became a community manager, in many ways, I was guilty of merging the two together. I learned that while I had once conflated scientific research with technological development, their institutional cultures, incentive structures, and epistemic norms differ in crucial ways. Similar cultural differences seemed to apply in the context of hardware engineers as opposed to software developers, often collectively grouped under as STEM professionals.

I gave a talk at the Data Justice conference (slides on Zenodo) in 2023 where I tried to tease out these differences, which stemmed from my own experience in the open ecosystem.

I gave an updated version of this paradigm later on during that summer, at ‘Moving frontiers of the demos: Enfranchisement, youth participation, and digital technologies’. My slides are on Zenodo as well.

This significantly expanded my framework, describing funding, their roles, and the crises that defined them.

Over time, I also came to understand how “openness” emerged as a response to the crisis of reproducibility in scientific research, reflecting not just technical challenges, but broader anxieties around public trust and accountability.

In my experience, documentation (ranging from reports to guidebooks to other informal notes) has often served to mediate this both internally and externally, a phenomenon I know might be useful to analyse through the lens of ‘audit cultures’ (a la Marilyn Strathern)

I’m keen to see how my thinking of this develops over time. My research and applied experiences have sharpened my conviction that humanitarian technologies – often piloted on the most vulnerable – serve as “canaries in the coal mine” for wider technological governance.

In my experiences so far, questions of trust, accountability, and legitimacy that arise in humanitarian contexts seem to be precursors to issues that later surface in more mainstream settings.

But the technologies that are developed by and for open scientists? That’s another question entirely.