"Currently the
bulk of the spatial data knowledge of the nation is embodied in the
agencies, people, and technologies that make
and use the nation's maps...[but] The needs
for spatial data are continually changing
. . . requiring much more information than is
traditionally represented on maps. These analyses.
. . cannot be supported by paper maps
alone. . .[consequently] spatial data that
are customarily represented on maps and aerial
photos are migrating to computer storage.
. . And there is much more to moving spatial
knowledge from paper to computers than simply
digitizing current paper maps. Although
digitizing paper maps automates the printing
of more paper maps, it does not by itself
support analytical needs...The people in the
NSDI will be profoundly affected by the
technical complexity of converting spatial
data from paper to computer data bases."
(Mapping Science Committee, 1995)
The presumption behind Project Varenius' research initiative, Empowerment, Marginalization, and Public Participation GIS, is of a divided, us-them world in which private businesses and state-owned institutions hold the power to communicate about people and places using geographic information technologies. There is a very real gulf between the powerful and people who may be marginialized by not knowing--that is by not having access to these technologies. This issue is worthy of study and advocacy as is the story of community activists who may choose to know--who embrace the technology as a means of liberation. (NCGIA 1997) However, the binary view may neglect an interesting social process that remains a constant whether one studies the use of geographic data from the top down or the bottom up. From either point of view, geographic information technologies and geographic data are frequently used to identify, attract, and transform previously disengaged people into new, sometimes virtual, communities. In turn, the original project undergoes transformation as the disengaged become players. What the people know that is electronic representations of place, are used paradoxically to argue both that place is crucial to the definition of a community and that place doesn't matter in the formation of new networked communities.
Since the majority of attendees at the public participation GIS conference are likely to focus on the needs for and the uses of geographic information technologies outside of formal institutional structures, this paper will, in the interest of difference, examine an instance of participatory community building initiated by federal government agencies. Although the idea to create a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) emerged from the interagency Federal Geographic Data Committee, in 1994, it was not envisioned as the creation of a centralized bureaucracy, but rather as a distributed structure of data, practices, technologies, and people in which geographic data producers and users in communities throughout the nation were linked by emerging information technologies. The key initiative of the NSDI that explicitly describes the social aspects of this network is framework, a distributed multi-use, multi-resolution, virtual data set of fundamental themes of geographic information. This framework of basic data themes is conceived as a public good to be used not only by the federal agencies but by state, local and tribal governments, non-profit organizations, the private sector, and ordinary citizens. The data sets are locally produced and maintained according to specified common procedures and standards and are held in the public domain and accessed through a searchable Internet-based clearinghouse. (Federal Geographic Data Committee 1997) Nancy Tosta, a principle architect of the NSDI and framework concepts wrote: "Is it possible we can create a coordinated framework that is not centrally controlled?"(1992) To become embodied, ideas need to attract adherents, and the process by which the framework idea was introduced to its audiences both inside and outside the beltway and the way the concept changed over the course of several years as the community responded bears striking resemblance to the way social scientists Callon and Law describe the process of enrollment or networking in scientific discourse. (1982)
The initial concept of enrollment has been expanded into a larger theory encompassing "how a coordinated set of heterogeneous actors...interact more or less successfully to develop, produce, distribute and diffuse methods for generating goods and services," a techno-economic network. (Callon 1992). Many of the later aspects of this theory will doubtless apply to the framework initiative as it develops, but since the framework is at an early stage, only the concept of enrollment as a device to magnify and in turn to alter an idea is examined here. It will be argued that the enrollment process is a necessary consequence of using technology to undertake action and that descriptions of how a group of federal agencies attempted to reach out and enlist others using geographic data can be applied equally well to a small environmental group using GIS at a public hearing to decide the fate of a toxic waste dump, ". . .the approach is indifferently available to the great and the small, because it is precisely about how it is that the small become big (or vice versa), and why it is that some succeed while others fail.(Callon and Law 1982)
The origins of framework
The framework was defined between 1993 and 1997 by the staff of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) working with small groups of spatial data professionals from several federal agencies and from state and local government. In general, the process by which these groups arrived at and published their consensus definitions of the framework (Federal Geographic Data Committee 1995 and 1997) closely followed aspects of the model established by Callon and Law.
According to Callon and Law scientists think, in the beginning, of the eventual marketability of their ideas. Key to marketability is the use and reuse of ideas and structures that are already current but may never before have been combined. (1982) The origins and early history of GIS technology is closely tied to the idea of integrated multi-purpose geographic data. Such states as Wisconsin and North Carolina pioneered data coordination efforts and the development of automated land information systems throughout the 1970's and 1980's. (Sherman and Tobler 1957, Chrisman 1998, Moyer and Niemann 1998). Chrisman, who worked at Wisconsin in the 1980's was an early proponent of incorporating social and cultural goals into GIS. (1987) The framework initiative thus combined two ideas already in circulation: extending community-based data coordination efforts nationally, and laying out the social structure that would be necessary to foster the development of a distributed cooperative network of data producers and users.
How do scientists evaluate the interests of others in their work and activities?
The first move in enscribing the national scope of the framework as a skeleton concept was the issuance of a Presidential executive order that called for the establishment of a framework of geographic data as part of the creation of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure. In the executive order, the framework was described as significant to "a broad variety of users within any geographic area or nationwide." (Clinton 1994) The executive order clearly spells out the interests in terms of economic choices: the federal government can work with the private sector and state, local, and tribal governments to cooperatively produce data, or the federal government can stand in the way of greater economic development and better environmental protection. In addition to these vaguely specified but lofty goals, the order appealed to a practical and immediate national goal, support for the 2000 Census. (Domaratz 1998)
The FGDC commissioned a team of academic researchers to assess the interests of spatial data users in state and local government across the country. The survey looked at "which sets of geographic and land data are being used and who is using them."( Frank et. al. 1994, 1995) The greatest number of returns were received from professionals and middle managers in local and state government. Some of the issues and choices that were being debated in the definition of framework were evident in the types of questions asked. For example, the survey asked which types of features (roads, interstate highways, bridges, etc. ) were typically needed when transportation data were used, or what kinds of spatial referencing systems were preferred. The survey did not attempt to assess the data needs of non-professionals. It seems clear from the way the survey is structured that many of the decisions about the content of the framework had already been made before the survey was complete.
At around the same time the Mapping Science Committee (MSC) of the National Academy of Science, representing the academic community, weighed in with an independent study of the framework concept. (Mapping Science Committee 1995) The study differed significantly from the concepts of the framework working group although it was produced at approximately the same time. The authors of the MSC study envisioned a "foundation" of geodetic, orthophoto, and elevation data upon which a "framework" of other data layers could be built. The framework supported by the FGDC has seven equally important layers: geodetic control, orthoimagery, elevation, transportation, hydrography, governmental units, and cadastral data. A question of significant interest beyond the present scope of this paper, but related to the question of whose interests the framework working group was seeking to enroll, is the origins and influence of this study.
Like the executive order and many other documents that emerged in the early days of the NSDI, the MSC study expresses a profound ambivalence toward the man-machine interface. Historically, spatial knowledge was "embodied" in people, their institutions and technologies in the making and using of maps, a very physical concept. In the digital era, the knowledge is suddenly "in the maps" and more ominously, "in the computer." People will have to adjust or be dislocated, and certainly can never again embody the spatial knowledge in the same way they once did. The spatial knowledge needed to construct and conduct modern life effectively has grown too complex. Even though it is frequently stated that GIS and geographic data are among the advantages of modern life, the implied dark side is that the ability to choose or decide, a freedom we have known since Adam and Eve, can now only be realized through these prosthetic machines. As Haraway notes: "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."(1991)[1]
Can the framework embody the knowledge once possessed by the people?
The framework working group, composed of FGDC staff and representatives from state and local government, was aware that a centralized database, even one collected from high-quality high-resolution local sources, could not succeed. But the suspicion was that organizations all over the country were already producing sets of basic data such as road, hydrography, units of government, etc. that others might need. Through the magic of emerging networking technologies, communities could pool their data and move it electronically into a virtual database. This same technology would allow a user anywhere to touch framework data all over the country.(Federal Geographic Data Committee 1995) But how to convince local communities to take ownership of their piece of framework? Writings about the framework published by the FGDC discussed the technical features of the framework but they also enrolled interest by making a case for the usefulness of the framework and by imagining a new social structure to support it. In this, they were again following the model described by Callon and Law:
"Actors great
and small try to persuade by telling one another that 'it is in your interests
to...'. They seek to define their own position
in relation to others by noting 'it is in our
interests to. . .'. What are they doing when
they so attempt to map and transform
interests? Our view is that they are trying
to impose order on a part of the social world.
They are trying to build a version of a social
structure." (1982)
The FGDC published two descriptions of the framework, The Development of a National Digital Geospatial Data Framework in 1995 and Framework: An Introduction and Guide, 1997. The first document contained a description of the framework resulting from the original framework working group's deliberations in 1993 and 1994. Discussions continued on the framework with a second group of many of the same individuals. The second document contains more details on several key aspects of the framework and makes significant changes to the envisioned social patterns. Both documents were subject to extensive public review, which simultaneously helped refine the concepts and served as enrollment devices. The earlier document describes the benefits to data producers (it is in our interest to have a framework so that there will be) "reduced expenditures for data... accelerated development of mission- critical applications, increased number of customers for data products linked to the framework and increased recognitions of programs. For users of data, the benefits are "increased ease of obtaining and using data collected by others." (FGDC 1995) By 1997, these data-focused benefits had been considerably expanded to place an emphasis on the cooperative supporting network of people. The framework was beginning to be seen as embodying what the people know about data: "Much of geographic data development nationwide and worldwide is based on developer's learning from the experiences of others. The framework represents the combined results of such experience and provides an environment for continued sharing." (FGDC 1997) It is also worth noting the extensive use of the words environment and "framework environment" in the second publication. From the framework as a base from which to do other things, it has come to be seen as something surrounding and interacting with the community.
The social structure that was imagined was a cooperative one, "a network and not a hierarchy" in which many formerly competitive organizations and individuals worked together for a common purpose. Important behavioral changes that are necessary to a successful framework are identified in the first publication as institutional roles. These institutional roles are described from the top down, beginning with policy establishment, clearly a national role, down to data production and data distribution which are seen as primarily local. Each institutional role had an associated set of activities that differed from role to role.
Two unusual roles were included: framework management and area integration. The framework managers certify and manage data integration nationally and handle standards and archive duties. Area integrators receive data from producers and incorporate them into the framework. The integration duties would be both thematic and across themes.(FGDC 1995) These two roles became controversial. The theme manager duties are seen as being performed by a consortium of organizations with national responsibilities such as federal agencies acting together. This would require national organizations with split responsibilities and missions to cooperate, something difficult to achieve. The role of the area integrators is one that did not exist at the time and was vaguely specified in the first document. Many of the comments received in the review of this document testified to the difficulty of imagining how area integrators would function. For example, the North Carolina Geographic Information Coordinating Council commented: "How much authority does the AI [area integrator] have to prevent and resolve duplication of data? What will be the basis for enforcement? Who integrates framework data sets across themes? What is the smallest area an AI could manage? How would the AI deal with different units of geography?" (1994) In addition, there were a number of comments in the public review of the first document on the top down nature of the social organization as described.
The second publication emphasizes the network rather than the hierarchy with an diagram that is literally decentered [Fig 1]. The institutional roles are replaced by action-oriented framework functions that describe activities without specifying the institutions for which they are appropriate. Organizational roles are defined on a continuum centralized to decentralized. The actions or functions are generic: data development, maintenance and integration, data access, data management, coordination, executive guidance, resource management, monitoring and response. One organization could take on all the roles in particular situations, or the roles could be assigned to different organizations. More emphasis is placed on resources, and monitoring and feedback, in line with the environmental or biological model. In short, the vision of the social organization necessary to support framework underwent a significant change from 1995 to 1997. Clearly the input of the two groups working on the ideas, and the public reviews caused a change in how the framework was viewed by its principle sponsors. While the staff of the FGDC and the members of the framework working group were enrolling and transforming converts, new converts were transforming the original concept of the framework.
We the people: making framework visible
State organizations that were concerned with geographic data coordination had formed the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) in 1994. NSGIC members played a key role in both framework working groups. In the review of the first framework document, many comments from NSGIC members concerned two issues: that the concept of the framework was too sophisticated for most of the county and local organizations with whom individual NSGIC members had daily contact, and that states were in a better position than the federal government to reach out to local data users. One result of the deliberations over the first framework document was the insertion of a Version 0 that addressed the issue of those who were not yet ready to participate in framework. (Domaratz 1998). "Version 0 identifies data that exist or are in work that may contribute to the framework, and makes this information available to the community." (FGDC 1995)
As the FGDC enrolled state and local governments first by surveying their interests, then by incorporating them into deliberations, and finally by producing documents (texts) whose aim was to appeal to common interests, NSGIC followed the same pattern. In 1996 NSGIC proposed to the FGDC a survey of data holdings within states, as part of Version 0 of the framework . In keeping with the idea that the social structure of the framework should be a network rather than a hierarchy, the survey did not have the rigorous statistical underpinning of a strictly academic survey, but was more participatory in nature. In this survey, state coordinators would be responsible for administering the survey within their state, and the choice of who to survey would be left to them rather that structured according to some grand design.
An explicit goal of the survey was to "empower state and local agencies to adopt a stewardship role within the context of the NSDI. An integral part of this proposal is the opportunity to build relationships between state and local organizations." (National States Geographic Information Council 1996) Several other distinguishing features of this survey that make it more of a communication tool than a rigorous academic survey are that responses are non-confidential; that the responses are geocoded; and that the data will be given back to the community to use in networking efforts. The obvious danger in non- confidentiality and in giving the data back to the community is that the authority of the data as it may speak as a representative sample of actual data holdings is compromised. But the trade off is that interested parties will know who has what data. The structure of framework relationships will simultaneously more evident and more transparent. Geocoding the responses means that the survey can be mapped. The geography of the framework can be made visible. In a community of people sensitive to geography mapping can serve as a powerful enrollment device as the areas with more dots can feel good about themselves and the areas with fewer dots will feel compelled to do something to catch up. (Fig. 2) The survey thus serves in its principal role as a communication and recruitment device. As recruitment efforts follow maps follow publications follow conversations follow analyses follow data gathering, the responses to the survey will in turn ripple back through the networks to change the idea of the framework in possibly unpredictable ways.
A vision of community
Some speculation should center on the origins of the vision of community laid out in the framework, for on the face of it, it makes no sense that geographic data--cold zeroes and ones stored in the black box of a very complicated system--should cause citizens to imagine a new social structure that will help people create communities. The automobile, the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet--all of these were seen in their early days as bringing people together. In fact the slogan "reach out and touch someone" has entered the lexicon as an embodied simulacrum for telephone use. We do not, however celebrate gasoline, electricity, the dial tone or html in quite the same way that people who work with geographic data celebrate data. It is precisely, I believe, because data has been taken to embody in some way how we feel about place that it fulfills this role in certain communities, and most prominently in discussions of the framework.
Daniel Kemmis, the former mayor of Missoula, Montana who was a keynote speaker at the national GeoData Forum in 1995, links the idea of community with the concept of place. The Latin derivation of republic is "the public thing." Kemmis quotes Hannah Arendt:
To live
together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between
those
who have it in common, as a table is located
between those who sit around it; the world
like every in-between, relates and separates
men at the same time. The public realm, as
the common world, gathers us together and
yet prevents our falling over each other, so to
speak. (Arendt 1958, quoted in Kemmis 1990)
Kemmis identifies this public thing with place, those "tangible mountains and plains," "public life can only be reclaimed by understanding, and then practicing, its connection to real, identifiable places." (1990) Similar sentiments animated the early framework discussions:
Power is often
a by-product of a political process, dependent on organizational culture
and the agendas of individuals within the
organization. Perhaps politics needs to be
humanized. Sitting across the table from someone
you like and respect can go a long way
toward facilitating the process of sharing
data. (Tosta 1992)
We need people,
based in a familiar place, to think and know about how to collect data
about that place, in a way that allows information
to be assembled, integrated, and used
intelligently...We need people who live in these
places to understand what the data and
their spaces mean, to understand how their activities
affect the quality of the space they
live in. (Tosta 1994)
What may ultimately prove most interesting in the long run is understanding how data, as a substitute for space and place is both unifying and separating.
Domination
Will the idea of the framework dominate? Perhaps, but it is too soon to tell. What this story is attempting to describe is a method for approaching the study of technology and society that avoids the either or of domination/submission. As concerned citizens we fear the domination scenario, but as Latour observes with respect to the development and eventual domination of the Kodak camera:
Is the final
consumer forced to buy a Kodak camera? In a sense, yes, since the whole
landscape is now built in such a way that
there is no course of action left but to rush to
the Eastman company store. However, this domination
is visible only at the end of the
story. At many other steps in the story the
innovation was highly flexible, negotiable, at
the mercy of a contingent event. It is this
variation that makes technology such an enigma
for social theory. (Latour 1992)[2]
Notes
[1]It should also be noted that Ian McHarg, the father of GIS, has himself called GIS prosthetic. (McHarg 1998) [Back]
[2]The ideas in this paper remain to be fleshed out with interviews of principal and not-so-principle players in the framework drama.
Sources
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Quoted in Kemmis, 1990.
Callon, Michel. 1992. Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. In John Law, ed. A Sociology of Monsters: Essays in Power, Technology, and Domination. London.Routledge.
Callon, Michel and John Law. 1982. On interests and their transformation. Social Studies of Science.12. 615-625
Chrisman, Nicholas R. 1987. Design of information systems based on social and cultural goals. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 53: 1367-1370
Chrisman, Nicholas R. 1998. Academic origins of GIS in The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers. In Foresman, 1998. 33-43
Clinton, William J. April 13, 1994. Executive Order 12906: Coordinating geographic data acquisition and access: The National Spatial Data Infrastructure. Washington, D.C. The Federal Register, Volume 59, no. 71. pp. 17671-17674.
Domaratz, Michael, 1998. Personal communication.
Federal Geographic Data Committee. 1995. Development of a national digital geospatial data framework. Washington, D.C.
Federal Geographic Data Committee. 1997. Framework introduction and guide. Washington, D.C.
Foresman, Timothy, ed. 1998. The history of geographic information systems: Perspectives from the pioneers. Upper Saddle River, N.J. Prentice Hall.
Frank, Stephen, Michael F. Goodchild, Harlan J. Onsrud, and Jeffry M. Pinto, 1994. Framework data sets for the NSDI. Unpublished manuscript.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York. Routledge.
Kemmis, Daniel. 1990. Community and the politics of place .Norman, Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1992. Technology is society made durable. In A Sociology of Monster: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, ed. John Law. Sociological Review Monograph. Vol. 38. London, Routledge. 103-131
Mapping Science Committee. 1995. A data foundation for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.
McHarg, Ian. 1998. Foreward. In Foresman, 1998.
Moyer, D. David, and Bernard J. Niemann, Jr. 1998. Land information systems: Development of multipurpose parcel-based systems in The History of Geographic Information Systems, ed. Foresman, 85-118
National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, 1997. Empowerment, marginalization and public participation GIS. http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/varenius/ppgis.hcgia.html. Accessed 9/29/98
National States Geographic Information Council. 1996. Building the NSDI: Measuring progress of framework activities. Proposed project summary. Unpublished.
National States Geographic Information Council. 1997. NSGIC, FGDC agree to survey framework data development. http://www.geo.drake.edu/nsgic/coop_pr.htm. Accessed 9/29/98.
North Carolina Geographic Information Coordinating Council, 1994. Unpublished comments on the Development of a national digital geospatial data framework report. December 16, 1994.
Sherman, J. and W. Tobler. 1957. The multiple use concept in cartography. Professional Geographer. 9(5), 5-7.
Tosta, Nancy. 1992. Data Sharing. Geo Info Systems. 2 (July-August), 32-34
Tosta, Nancy. 1994. Adopt a piece of the earth. Geo Info Systems. 4 (July), 31-33.
![[Fig 1].](http://www.fgdc.gov/framework/frameworkintroguide/figure4-1.gif){kind=link}
