I see this archive as potentially being of interest to a number of groups:
Energy service organizations in Philadelphia (such as Neighborhood Energy Centers, Energy Coordinating Agency, Community Legal Services); state and federal energy advocacy organizations (PULP, NEAUC, NARUC); energy transition and environmental justice orgs in Pennsylvania (Clean Air Council, Sierra Club, Green Building United); utility companies and the PA PUC
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.
Because this archive is centered around public schools any and all families of school-age children should be interested in the archive. Students wanting to learn more about the built environments they grew up in should also be interested. Anyone interested in governance in Azusa and neighboring localities should be interested. Finally, anyone interested in issues of justice, and they way that it is interwoven across environmental, social-economic, educational, etc, issues of justice.
The question of how to make this archive known and accessible to these multiple audiences, I think, will be an interative process of bringing in various stakeholders and keeping open a space of accessibility, while also creating sites of sophisticated analysis and interpretation.
Community members in Urequio and Wilmington, CA; environmental justice activists or groups; researchers, activists or professionals working on questions of infrastructure