This research focuses on the work practices and digital infrastructure use of a fast-growing, high-value population called here 'mobile knowledge professionals' (MKPs). MKPs have specific, typically rare, expertise: they are researchers and knowledge brokers across all industries who combine expertise, creativity and digital resources to successfully accomplish their intellectually demanding work. An MKP's professional success requires sophisticated social and technical acumen to efficiently and accurately leverage digital and organizational resources -- a skill set that is based on understanding the availability, uses and potential of technological systems and their relationship to organizational, temporal and spatial boundaries.
This research stands to advance the state of mobile knowledge work and cyberinfrastructure (CI), while simultaneously enabling the development of novel data collection methods and archival standards. More broadly, its findings will help organizations better envision the MKP workforce of the future, assist designers in their quest to build new knowledge infrastructures, and help scholars prototype and implement nascent standards for sharing ethnographic data as a community resource.
