Halkola et al. (2014) - Author version of the accepted paper Cite as: Halkola, E., Iivari, N., Kinnula, M., Kuure, L., & Molin-Juustila, T. (2014, January). A Nexus Analysis of Participation in Building an Information Infrastructure for the ‘Future School’. In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 4457-4466). IEEE. © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. A Nexus Analysis of Participation in Building an Information Infrastructure for the 'Future School' Halkola, Eija a , Iivari, Netta a , Kinnula, Marianne a, Kuure, Leena b and Molin-Juustila, Tonja a a Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, b English Philology, University of Oulu firstname.lastname@oulu.fi Abstract Information systems projects nowadays often affect more stakeholders than before and the range of users is also more versatile. Thus, a need for a fine-grained conceptualization of involved actors, including users and developers as well as various other affected stakeholder groups, has been identified in the literature. Some studies have already discussed participatory processes for information infrastructure (II) development. Our study complements this research theme by offering a nexus analytic discourse analysis of participation of various actors in an effort of building an II for an educational network of a city, the actors including educational authorities as well as school staff, children, companies, and researchers. We found a number of discourses as well as concrete participatory practices justifying wide-ranging participation of various actors. Based on this, we suggest advocating for more genuine participation of teachers and pupils as part of the infrastructuring process, e.g. by creating enabling practices. 1. Introduction User participation has been a traditional topic in Information Systems (IS) research. Today’s IS projects, however, often affect more stakeholders than before and the range of users is also more versatile. Along with such changes, new challenges and perspectives on user participation theory have emerged. Among other things, there is a need for a fine-grained conceptualization of actors involved, including users and developers as well as various other affected stakeholder groups. [15] This study focuses on the participatory process of building an information infrastructure (II) [25] for an educational network of a Finnish city. The educational network refers to local schools and the municipal educational administration. Through this process, teachers and headmasters were invited to participate in the program for ‘the future school’, to develop school culture and to look for the best practices in pedagogy and technology use for ‘school in the 21st century’. We will examine how participation by various actors has evolved over time in this complex setting, including the educational authorities as well as school staff and children, through an analysis of interviews with the key persons responsible in the effort. We rely on the research framework of nexus analysis [22], which allows extending the perspective from the micro level to the organizational and institutional levels of social analysis that are necessarily intertwined. Nexus analysis provides tools to explore participation as social action [21] from the point of view of concrete practices and wider discourses. This study utilizes literature on user participation and literature on the development of IIs, within which some studies have already discussed participatory processes for II development [6, 13, 18, 8, 19]. In this study, various actors have taken part, but without our intervention. This allows us to contribute to the recent II discourse, and particularly to that dealing with participatory design ‘in the wild’ without interventions by researchers (in line with [13]). Moreover, our study addresses an everyday life context of school, including school children as one user group