Inclusive Futures for the National Federation of Digital Research Infrastructures: Exploring Power Dynamics and Epistemic Cultures

Executive summary 

What is the “Inclusive Futures” project? 

This report is part of the project Inclusive Futures: User Cultural Narratives and Mapping Pathways for NFCS, whose aim was to explore how federated Digital Research Infrastructures (DRIs), such as National Federated Compute Services, shape scientific 
collaboration and culture. The project lasted from August 2025 to July 2026, and it was funded by NetworkPlus – a new UKRI-funded initiative (EPSRC) aimed at strengthening collaboration and knowledge exchange between researchers, service providers, and stakeholders. The inclusive futures project aimed to 1) identify the cultural and epistemic challenges that hinder the national federation of DRIs, and 2) collaboratively develop pathways for more inclusive community building and governance, which can inform the NFCS roadmaps. 

What problem is addressed?  

The national coordination of DRIs has become essential for supporting investments in large-scale computing, both at the exascale level and in AI. However, this work is inherently interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral. A critical challenge lies in bridging communities with distinctive epistemic cultures – i.e., diverse ways of knowing, reasoning, and doing – as power relations across disciplines and sectors are reorganised and digital infrastructures and technologies repurposed. Therefore, this report focused on identifying the social, cultural, epistemic and institutional tensions that need to be considered when designing and developing the national federation of DRIs.  

How is the problem approached?  

The project focused on the relationship of power relations and epistemic cultures as new users and sector seek to join federated DRIs. Drawing on a sociological perspective, the project conceptualised the DRI as a social system that becomes institutionalised by drawing boundaries between itself and its environment – the wider research and innovation ecosystem. As such, the DRI survives by reducing complexity - e.g., epistemologies - of the environment through selective filtering of what it can process. Consequently, federated DRI develops their own “social and cultural codes”, which define how they differentiate themselves from other systems (Lamont & Molnár, 2002). However, these codes and norms are not developed in isolation; they are embedded within a web of power relations and shaped by a contested landscape of epistemic cultures. Thus, who holds power within a social system controls the “filtering process”. For example, the High-Performance Computing (HPC) community operates with its own distinctive codes, which shape key aspects of the DRI system. Because of this, the HPC community holds a position of power within the DRI landscape that can make it difficult for the DRI system to integrate the diversity and complexity of epistemic cultures seeking to join the system.  
The integration (inclusion) of new users and communities depends on the existence of what can be described as “stabilised interfaces” – i.e., institutionalised coupling arrangements (durable) that make communication across boundaries repeatable and reliably connectable without requiring full consensus or a shared worldview (Lamont & Molnár, 2002). For instance, universities couple science and education, enabling coordination between systems while preserving each system’s internal logic. This form of “coupling” facilitates interaction without full integration. In other words, it is about structures and mechanisms designed for building epistemic trust among epistemically differentiated cultures. However, inclusion also depends on “destabilised interfaces” – non-institutional arrangements through which cross-boundary collaboration remains emergent, contingent, and structurally conflictual. Interfaces such as “alignment work”, “resistance practices”, and “trading zones” operate as flexible practices and spaces that can be tailored to specific communities while still supporting intelligibility across communities. Crucially, these interfaces are continuously negotiated and renegotiated within and across communities (Bowker & Star, 1999; Star & Griesemer, 1989).  
This conceptual framework was used to explore the social, cultural, epistemic, and institutional tensions emerging from the federation of DRIs. Empirically, the study combined a survey with semi-structured interviews involving active, potential, and inactive DRI users across academia, the public sector, and industry – a comparative framework. The survey mapped competing imaginaries, values, and practices associated with DRI federation, while the interviews examined current and future tensions, with particular attention to the challenges of developing nationally federated DRIs. 

What are the results? 

The combined results from the survey and interviews are six tensions along two axes. The power axis includes tensions between centralisation and decentralisation, invisibility and visibility, and privacy and surveillance. The epistemic axis includes tensions between empowerment and disempowerment, uncertainty and certainty, and unity and disunity. These six tensions are accompanied with user narratives (from active, potential and inactive users) that highlight existing and future barriers to DRI national federation, as well as the social, cultural, epistemic and institutional conditions that may enable its development.