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Aid Information and “the Political” In the preceding chapter we characterized the AidData conference in Oxford as a diagnostic event. It offered us an entry point from which to begin tracing the contours of the aid transparency movement, and it allowed us to characterize its emerging publics. Among the half-imagined, half-real users making up this constituency we identified several figures, among them the ordinary citizen and the wired-up user. We also pointed to the vividly felt presence of not-yet-informatted bureaucrats. Common among these types is a shared temporal orientation: all are users and are headed toward a future of increasingly transparent information. (See Jensen 2010a, 31–51.) Whereas the versions of the ordinary citizen and the wired-up user created by the technologists and the aid developers are in some sense quite abstract, universal (Oudshoorn et al. 2004), or potential figures, the informatted bureaucrat is rather more actual. People working in the central administrations of many developing countries are well aware of the demand for, and the potential of, making processes more transparent. However, bureaucrats are also tied up with everyday office work in ways that make their relation to the future of aid infrastructure ambiguous. As they work with existing systems and routines, their expectations for revolutionary technological changes is more circumspect than other visions we have discussed. A particular sense of guarded realism makes these bureaucrats embrace the promises of transparent information less fully. To come to terms with this discrepancy, this chapter explores some of the processes through which new aid infrastructure come to be imagined by its developers. In physics, the term potential energy designates “the energy difference between the energy of an object in a given position and its energy at a reference position.”1 Wikipedia offers a simple illustration: “Think of a roller coaster. When the coaster climbs a hill it has potential energy. At the very top of the hill is its maximum potential energy. When the car speeds down 4 Development Loop: Technological Politics for Transparency 72 Chapter 4 the hill potential energy turns into kinetic. Kinetic energy is greatest at the bottom.” Analogously, we argue that the energy invested in envisioned aid information users is maximized as potential in development contexts in which it has had little chance to be depotentialized as “kinetic energy.” Such depotentialization occurs, we suggest, in the frictional movements whereby (as technology developers typically put it) aid infrastructures are “put into practice.” The limitation of this analogy is that the conversion of potential energy into movement sounds conspicuously like the “diffusion model” of innovation . (See, e.g., Rogers 2003. For a critique, see Latour 1987.) It encourages us to imagine new technologies diffusing into diverse practice owing to their own inherent momentum (their “potential energy”), unless hindered by specific “resistances” that generate friction. Indeed, this doesn’t seem too far from how technology optimists view the matter. This picture is quickly complicated by the fact that, as in Latour’s critique of diffusion, each movement of technology entails translation and transformation. When viewed in this way, friction isn’t simply a matter of accounting for the energy of a system that dissipates through movement. Rather, friction is simultaneously what slows diffusion and what moves infrastructure in unforeseen directions. Below, we further characterize some ways in which the development and the implementation of infrastructures of accountability are based on the imaginative, technological, organizational, and political skills of aid transparency architects and coders. In the previous chapter we paid attention to the configuration of particular kinds of users. In this chapter we will focus on how the potentials of new tools for transparency are presented online. We begin by describing the “demo” version of a user application for personal computers and mobile phones meant to facilitate transparency . We couple this discussion with an analysis of the political efficacy these technologies are imagined to have. The empirical base of this chapter includes both face-to-face interaction with people in the aid transparency movement and promotional materials found on YouTube that explain the design intentions and rationales of new apps for transparency. Like other informational tools that aim to connect citizens and the state through Web interfaces (for example, health portals; see Adams, de Bont, and Berg 2006; Blobel et al. 2010), transparency apps do not make their public arrival fully formed. Of course these apps must be designed and programmed. But they also have to be enacted as technological tools that make it possible...

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