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Open government data answers cities' need for new capital resources in a post-recession context and addresses a self-conscious concern about the lagging technological modernization of public institutions. This understanding promotes data-centric management strategies and encourages a mechanistic understanding of how to solve city problems; it leads to new data hybrids born out of data-sharing partnerships between government and the private sector. This proceeding focuses specifically on how, through open data work, staff view their records as administrative and commercial assets and fonts of innovation that improve private and public sector services. Some employees see city records as a source of easy capital, whether cost-saving efficiencies internally or innovation by the private sector. Others see open data as a solution for managing outsized, complex city problems.

While infrastructures are governed by institutions and rules, they also govern us, as social actors, by their very design. This special issue is dedicated to the study of the governance embedded in infrastructures, as opposed to the governance of the effects they might produce. From machine learning to artificial intelligence, from gig economy platforms to the infrastructures used by governments for advertising or social security, the articles in this special issue highlight the digital governance we are subject to, while exploring alternatives we might consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has made infrastructural through an automated payment system. From our empirical study, we offer two sets of examples of how UC's particular temporality shapes claimant experience of the benefit. In these cases, the monthly assessment period conflicts with other temporalities that claimants must contend with -- those set by employers through their employer payment cycle, in one, and the timeframes dictated by childcare providers and the practical needs of people with young children in the other. In both cases, a temporal mismatch leads to a loss of entitlement, a phenomenon we call temporal punitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]