This is an interesting question. I observed and worked with many different groups who have different stakes in Austin’s energy transition and don’t always see eye to eye (engineers, lawyers, ej activists, environmentalists, clean energy entrepreneurs, etc.). All of them are implicated, and many might have interest in participating in the archiving project, but (I am assuming) not all for the same reason.
The archive could serve as something like a “boundary object’ for their collaboration (see Star’s work on the concept). It would be interesting to have participants with a diversity of expertise, politics, and ethics working in the same archive, but not exactly (or not necessarily) working together. Perhaps using PECE’s groups functions to organize different spaces for siloed work along with spaces for intersection. It would be fascinating to see if and how their artifacts and analytics traveled across these groups.
Sunrise ATx and 350 Austin are two groups that I believe I could recruit fairly easily. They both have active campaigns that include some kind of research, and could benefit from a collaborative research infrastructure. Depending on their experience and the collections they manage to produce, I might be able to branch out from there.
