toward a definition of "personal cyberinfrastructure"

How’s this for a first kick at the cat? Huge gaps, but I’m trying to avoid writing a 200 page definition full of acronyms and words requiring further definition…

Personally, I’m not a fan of the word “cyberinfrastructure” as it seems to make people glaze over in its made-up-wordness. But, it appears to have some legs. Whatever. I guess the next best thing to having a word that doesn’t suck, is having a crappy word with a half decent definition…

For the purposes of this paper, “personal cyberinfrastructure” will be defined as a customizable, individually managed infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information and communication technology (modified after NSF (2003), page 5.)¹. This infrastructure can include commercially hosted services such as Flickr.com or Wordpress.com, but emphasizes personally managed software, usually open source, deployed on available webserver resources. Typically, this infrastructure includes a web server running content management or weblog software to publish content to the public internet.