Sandra Balbierz

Material, not waste!

Sociological insights from the development of a platform

Platform development is not only a technical task. It first starts with a definition of the problem which shall be solved. This is the first point to ‚pass‘ in a complex project with many experts from different fields.

In the PERIVALLON project the following problem definition was shared: Due to increasing incidents in the field of waste and pollution crime and the amount of work that cannot only be done by a few police officers, a platform providing multimodal analytics will be developed to better and more efficiently investigate waste and pollution crimes. By the help of the platform, incidents will be detected and a risk analysis will be performed. This is part of what is called ‘intelligence-led policing’.

During the development a lot of passage points have to be passed. I will focus on the ‚experts gap‘ in the beginning of such a project: On the one hand technical developers have an understanding of the back-end and front-end of a platform and how to develop and arrange different components and streams of data. They express this in their technology-oriented language. On the other hand, end users have certain needs and are experts in their fields expressing theirs needs and domain knowledge in their domain-oriented language. In the case of the PERIVALLON project they like to have a technical solution to support investigations in the field of waste and pollution crime. Both perspectives and interests must be synchronised. Thus, the first step in such a project is (i) developing a basic understanding of the others‘ persoective and language and (ii) defining the needs in form of requirements.

From the point of view of an external observer, there should not be any issues. These two groups talk with each other and then the ‘wish-list’ will be implemented. As a reader you may guess, there can be several potential issues. Besides a well-positioned project management, it is this matter of ‘language’ combined with the question of ‘what the matter of concern is’. I will explain this by using a situation as an example.

In this situation, the technical developers had a meeting with representatives of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and asked them, which types of waste are common in their daily business. This was important as the developers need a typology of waste for developing a risk assessment tool. The question ‘What types of waste are part of the crimes you investigate?’ is not that easy as it seems. For the LEAs it was clear, that – in the first instance – it is not about waste. They repeated, it is about material. When the police arrives at a potential crime scene, the officers just see material. Waste – for the police officers – is a matter of a legal definition. By the support of forensics and knowledge of the relevant legal frameworks, it has to be carried out if the incident is a crime and if waste was involved. This is also clear when tackling one of the prominent modus operandi in this field: to declare something as waste which is not waste and vice versa. The discussion around the question ‘which word to choose’ was important as it was not only about ‘words’. It was about defining the ‚matter of concern‘ and developing understanding why waste is not the first expression to use.

In Actor-Network-Theory such situations are called obligatory passage points (OPP). These are certain points in time during definition of problems and the implementation of certain solutions. OPPs are of strategic importance in a network or team as they force actors to commit to a certain question or problem definition. This is the reason why OPP become a key element in the formation of teams and projects. OPPs are a way of understanding how order and coordination emerge in complex systems, where various actors with different needs and interests come together and align around a shared point to achieve collective outcomes.

Imagine, this discussion has not been taken place. The technical developers would have built a legal concept into the platform, thereby anticipating what has to be defined at a later stage in the investigation process.

The conclusion: The social is not only shaped by technologies, but also built in the technologies. By taking a closer look, the ‘black box’ technology is a product of many processes, including negotiations between different partners.