CDSC member Kaylea Champion’s dissertation, “Social and Technical Sources of Risk in Sustaining Digital Infrastructure,” has been selected for two awards: the 2025 Annie Lang Dissertation Award from the International Communication Association Information Systems Division, and the 2025 Faculty Award for Outstanding Research – Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the Department of Communication University of Washington.
Kaylea’s dissertation develops new methods to measure and understand risks to our shared digital infrastructure–including platforms, communication systems, the web, and the cloud. Digital infrastructure faces a form of risk called underproduction–highly important, but low-quality software. She argues we can identify this risk by examining the social and technical conditions of software production communities.
Using analysis methods she developed and validated, she found thousands of at-risk software packages. These packages are often old, or written in older languages. However, simply directing more resources toward software maintenance may not be enough: at-risk packages are more likely to be maintained by larger numbers of people and by people who are already highly active in the development community. She identified two factors associated with lower risk: empowerment and retention. Kaylea’s work joins a growing base of scholarship across the CDSC focusing attention toward contributors as a key part of building thriving peer production communities for the benefit of the greater public.
Kaylea will join the faculty of the University of Washington Bothell as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Computing and Software Systems, School of STEM, in Fall 2025.
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