Short abstract:

Improving longitudinal data infrastructures in Italy is a project aimed at the formation, enactment, and co-construction of a new complex infrastructure. Our multidisciplinary team is questioning the ethical, epistemic, methodological, political, and economic implications of the choices adopted.

Long abstract:

‘Improving longitudinal data infrastructures in Italy’ is an ambitious endeavor, developed within the project ‘Fostering Open Science in Social Science Research’, that engages researchers and academics in the formation, enactment, and co-construction of new research infrastructure (Neumann & Star, 1996; Ribes & Baker, 2007).

This constitutes a major challenge (Edwards et al., 2013), that compels us to address various issues (Leonelli, 2023):

- The concept of openness: This is a means of sharing resources but primarily a way to foster meaningful communication among individuals involved.

- Ethical concerns: The risk of reinforcing conservatism, discrimination, commodification, and inequality.

- Epistemic concerns: The mechanisms through which reliability and robustness are ensured.

- Methodological choices: The awareness that procedures for sampling, representation, modelling, communication, and interpretation depend on technical features, social context, and the backgrounds and goals of the individuals involved.

- The socio-political context: This involves considering pluralities, situated approaches, and guarding against political distortions.

- The risk of commercial drifts and exploitations.

The project brings together a network of Italian and European Research Infrastructures to produce high-quality data on Italy’s population. It connects the Italian Online Probability Panel (IOPP), the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS), and the Growing Up in Digital Europe survey (GUIDE). A critical assessment of the impact of choices made in the above domains is vital (Bowker & Star 1999). This contribution shows how competing discourses, based on sociotechnical imagery (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), influence data infrastructure development.