1 Social Influence and Technological Frames in Cyber-Infrastructure Projects: The Case of GENI E. Ilana Diamant Katz Graduate School of Business University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 eid3@pitt.edu Laurie J. Kirsch Katz Graduate School of Business University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 lkirsch@katz.pitt.edu Sandra A. Slaughter College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30308 Sandra.slaughter@mgt.gatech.edu Greg D. Moody Katz Graduate School of Business University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 gmoody@katz.pitt.edu Bin Li College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30308 Bin.Li@mgt.gatech.edu ABSTRACT We discuss research on GENI, a program of multiple cyberinfrastructure (CI) projects. Drawing on the concept of technological frames we discuss how the projects’ stakeholders perceived and presented the competing technologies that were part of GENI and how they attempted to influence GENI’s development. Author Keywords Cyberinfrastructure, information systems, software development projects, technological frames INTRODUCTION Critical Aspects of CI Systems Cyberinfrastructure (CI) refers to large-scale computer, information, and communication technologies that are physically distributed and that enable innovative scientific research [3]. Cyberinfrastructure is the catalyst of scientific innovation, as it supports the development of complex models, simulations, and visualizations, as well as the collection, integration, use, and sharing of large amounts of data. Developing CI requires experts from multiple fields who form multi-disciplinary research groups that often span institutional, disciplinary and communities-of-practice boundaries. In addition to academic participants [5], [8] there is also involvement on the part of industry experts and practitioners. University research centers are forming partnerships with the practitioner community while deploying CI to support joint research projects (e.g., [6]). In contrast to stand-alone information systems (IS), CIs include multiple, complementary and integrated resources (equipment, data, software). Integration and complementarity create tight coupling (socio-technical dependencies) among the CI users and the IS resources. CI users rely on a limited set of interconnected resources (technical coupling) and on each others’ willingness to share data, reports and other research-related contributions (social coupling). The tightly coupled CI resources might create technical, but not necessarily social, incentives and