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Welcome to RiskWiki!

RiskWiki is an educational website being implemented as an engineering wiki with articles about various Civil Engineering (CE) topics with civil engineering uncertainty and risk as the capstone meta-knowledge element. The underlying engine for RiskWiki, Mediawiki, is the same content engine used by Wikipedia but with many style and customization differences made.
We also have organized Portals to help navigate RiskWiki as well as to find information of interest to engineering professionals, academics, and students.
While the site focuses on risk, many other civil engineering topics must be explored and discussed as foundational concepts. It will offer articles that provide analysis, commentary, and additional reading. RiskWiki is intended to serve as a broad resource to the engineering community and civil engineers. We have added a lot of new material in this area.

• The primary focus of RiskWiki is complex civil engineering projects using civil engineering processes and controls.
• A secondary focus of RiskWiki is civil engineering programs.

These articles will be presented in the standardized format of an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia that allows the reader to examine the material in a logical sequence with hyperlinked terms:

• First, prefatory material or basic considerations for the article are presented.
• Engineering terminology is often beset with terms used interchangeably for several major concepts and in several different contexts, so the semantics of the term are discussed and analyzed. The logical framework is also presented and hyperlinked to allow cross-referencing on key concepts.
• Professional knowledge will next be presented in a "practice frameworks" section that builds upon the previous semantic and logical analysis. This is often in the form of a body of knowledge produced by relevant professional societies such as the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Project Management Institute PMI, or International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Each practice version will have commentary, analysis, and recommendations for the professional. Significant research will also be a part of the section.
• As noted in other places, civil engineers often practice in regulatory and programmatic contexts. Regulations do not appear without legislative guidance, so the articles proceed from professional frameworks through the prism of legislation into regulatory and programmatic frameworks.
• Every knowledge concept or object has limits on its usage and therefore sections on "Further Guidance", "Beneficial Outcomes" are given.
• Lastly, working definitions of the term and practice-specific variants are given.
• Further reading for the professional is suggested, as well as planning for academic resources.

The site is also intended to support learning in either a formal academic or corporate training environment as well as individual study efforts and online educational materials.

• If you would like us to develop any specific materials for you, please feel free to address any requests on these subjects to email Administrator.

If you would like to contribute to this Wiki by adding new pages or adding to existing pages, you may do so by becoming a registered user: email Administrator.

Why is Civil Infrastructure important?

Infrastructure is a platform for governance, commerce, and economic growth and is a lifeline for modern societies.

It is the platform upon which the world's economies function and our prosperity depends.

By virtue of the way we live modern life, almost everyone in societies ... is familiar with infrastructure and relies on its benefits. We turn on lights. We flush toilets. We eat food that we did not grow.

Infrastructure has been characterized as the mechanism that delivers the "..fundamental needs of society: food, water, energy, shelter, governance ... without infrastructure, societies disintegrate and people die." As a society, Americans enjoy the use of "...highway, waterway, air, and rail systems that have allowed the unparalleled mobility of people and goods. Water-borne diseases are virtually nonexistent because of water and wastewater treatment, distribution, and collection systems. In addition, telecommunications and power systems have enabled our economic growth."
This development happened over a period of several centuries and represents a number of successes and failures in what is currently termed infrastructure but also in the past was termed "public works" and even before that "internal improvements".
Indeed in the United States, we have a long history of federal support for building great infrastructures such as the National Road, Erie Canal, transcontinental railways, inland navigation coupled with flood mitigation and control, the Panama Canal, and the interstate highway system and efforts in improving seismic design and construction over the last century. This has also stimulated discussion among world leaders on the ...

"broad and urgent issues of energy, infrastructure (particularly for electricity and transportation), and climate change...(that) have become inextricably linked as societies around the world discuss, disagree, debate, and make decisions about properly balancing the production and use of energy against the quality of life and economic opportunity.

Therefore, for any society, even the American society, its economy is "... inextricably linked with the infrastructure that supports it...(and) the social, political, and economic structure of a society can magnify or mitigate the effects of a failure in infrastructure and vice versa."

Civil infrastructure and the rise of projects

Civil infrastructure, like canals, railroads, bridges, etc., quickly became singular and substantial ventures for their sponsors, first cities and then nations. Not all succeeded, as the state bankruptcies in the 19th Canal building in the young United States demonstrate. Even at the height of the industrial revolution and the rise of modern society, less than a dozen nation-states built large-scale infrastructure. Even in the 21st century, infrastructure is still viewed as a hallmark of advanced economic development. Crucially, the unique character of these undertakings marks an "...explicit and deliberate disconnection from history and future" to create the exceptional circumstances that facilitate the accelerated delivery of this infrastructure given its heavy cost and long schedules.
This investment also required organizations to manage the "unprecedented scale and complexity of the challenges with regard to capital investments, public attention and stakeholder participation". Large organizations must be built, and specialized labor must be recruited and mobilized during this infrastructure effort. The sponsors must secure funding and negotiate with multiple stakeholders while contending with the daily direction of the endeavor. Once the endeavor has been accomplished, the organization is dissolved in what has been termed "institutionalized termination". These efforts to accomplish the national ambitions for infrastructure gave rise to the modern vision of projects and were a driving social factor in at least two ways: creating an environment that fostered first the rise of the civil infrastructure occupation and then the engineering professions as well as the related industry and professional communities. As such, the notion of a project allows a society to organize and manage its infrastructure endeavor as a distinct set of given tasks, separate from the “continuity of past/present/future” (Hernes et al., 2013) as well as an artificial constraint on its institutional life such as as a count down clock (Lundin et al., 2001)."

The constant pressure to deliver infrastructure effectively and efficiently has forced the development and evolution of the project as the primary vehicle for successfully delivering civil infrastructure.

The Work of civil infrastructure and the rise of occupations

A project needs to be designed by and around people, and its success is dependent upon the will, commitment, and ability of those individuals for their creation, development, and termination. Project organizations mobilize large numbers of people with a variety of education and experience in order to focus their energy in the form of work towards a common set of goals or objectives. A key factor in the success of these endeavors is the ability or capacity of the project to control the definition of the work tasks and the allocation of labor, more specifically, specific groups of labor to certain tasks. For civil infrastructure, this allocation is a continuum of labor "...differentiated by the locus of control over the division of labor" by the project organization as a way of determining of who does what, managed by whom. This labor allocation is based upon the life experiences at any given time of the mobilized labor forces, stratified into cohorts and their subsets and constituting the basis for labor occupations. In this sense, when someone assigns a person an "occupation", it locates them in a category of workers accomplishing tasks within a division of labor. Abbott argues further that occupations have several other realities; namely, they are identifiable and stable groups of workers (as opposed to simple categories of transient work) with sustained participation, which may occasionally rise to the level of being formally recognized such as the crafts or professions.
Project organizations manage the accomplishment of civil infrastructure within this space of project work and available labor by means of management and allocation of that mobilized labor. The fundamental locus of this process is the product of project work assigned to a specific labor group or occupation. Within this framework, one can define the term "job" as allocated work for which no control is exerted over the allocation. In this sense, an occupation is determined by the project organization, where there is consensus over the tasks to be allocated to this portion of the labor force. Classical thinking in sociology has taught that occupations were different than professions or crafts in that the consensus had not been developed through formalized training or regulatory authority.

The constant pressure to deliver infrastructure effectively and efficiently has forced the development and evolution of the project organization's capacity and capability to control the definition of work and the allocation of labor.

In the case of the latter, it is important to allocate work to identifiable and stable groups of workers (as opposed to simple categories of transient work) with sustained participation, resulting in specialized experience and learning.

Over time and with the emergence of technology, this allocation of labor would give rise to certain occupations achieving the level of being formally recognized, namely the crafts and professions.

Civil Infrastructure and the rise of the engineering professions

The modern professions developed during the early eras of capitalism in Europe, but they were distinctive in societies increasingly dominated by the logic and spirit of the market... caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) versus credat emptor (“let the taker believe in us”).
The aspirations of the nation for its infrastructure are often expressed ... (by) professional organizations.

National ambitions for infrastructure are not always expressed or executed successfully. The early canal period in North America serves to make the point. The then colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania conducted surveys to determine route locations and feasibility for water canals using existing waterways to connect the eastern Atlantic seaboard with the newly formed Northwestern territories, mainly the Ohio Valley. Europe went through this period from the 16th to early 18th century until the development of the "engineered" canal that connected two points, whether there was a waterway. Examples were the mid-18th century "Sankey" and "Bridgewater" canals. In the American case, the Pennsylvania Canal scheme of 1790 was unsuccessful and would not be revived until the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825.
Due to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment and the ambitions for accomplishing civil infrastructure, first projects evolved, and then specialized labor or occupations developed. As the complexity grew, so also did the related uncertainties associated with civil infrastructure, thus there was a social need for certainty. At first, it was scientific in nature, but then, the new concept of technology emerged. Professions and the newly formalized one known as engineering provide a special function in our society and economy where investing substantial sums of funding in public infrastructure requires "...some assurance that it will perform its intended function." This is not an absolute guarantee, but it is the engineer exercising their professional judgment that is "the practical certainty" that makes social investment in public infrastructure possible and makes the world "..a less uncertain place than it might seem..."
The rise of modern society also required the "...unification of societies" and the development of national societies and economies. It was the compelling economic logic of this trend that provided the rationalization for the rise of the professions and their vision of occupational imperialism that closed markets. This has evolved in the late 20th and 21st centuries to become national frameworks of public and private civil infrastructure, sustained by public taxation and user fees, requiring "...a reasonably consistent means of interpreting and applying it..." thus the rise of the professions and particularly that of engineering, especially, civil engineering.
The increasingly urgent challenge for the professions is that more and more of this 21st-century infrastructure possesses an inherent complexity and pace that may, at times, threaten to exceed the profession's ability to manage them to social expectations. The very essence of social acceptance and perceived legitimacy of the profession is the confidence that society places in it.

"A large-scale society demands comparable institutions to sustain and regulate it. These are not all to be found in the state but the modern nation-state could not have developed without the co-evolution of professions such as civil engineering."

The Civil Engineering context

The practice of the civil engineering discipline by civil engineering professionals under the overall direction of a professional society such as the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) acting as the organized "civil engineering profession", impacts the health and vitality of a nation as no other profession does. The National Academy of Sciences has noted that the country's business competitiveness, military strength, health, and standard of living are intimately connected to engineering.(Emphasis added)

As noted above, modern societies require modern and complex civil infrastructure successfully delivered by project organizations that control work development and allocation of labor, especially specialized labor. The complexity of these infrastructure projects will require the use of new management forms such as civil infrastructure programs to align multiple projects on major objectives, transfer knowledge between projects, adapt strategies to subtle shifts in program layer goals/objectives, mediate conflicts between program layer sponsors and project layer stakeholders; deliver more specialized forms of management control, namely oversight.
A significant portion of the latter of that assigned work is work allocated to engineering professionals, in this case, civil engineers. This will force changes in existing social forms and practices, continue to give rise to new labor allocations and recognize new civil infrastructure occupations. These changes and economic pressures will also challenge existing highly credentialed and regulated occupations, namely the engineering professions and civil engineering in particular.

To generate value and social acceptance, the civil engineering profession must be able to identify, create, and continuously manage occupational and professional knowledge, especially technical knowledge, as knowledge may be the most strategically significant resource any profession can possess.

This will require the disciplined development and integrated application of empirical and theoretical knowledge, effective meta-knowledge, and meta-data in a manner that executes the project, manages risk, adds value, and meets or exceeds stakeholder expectations, which is the purpose of the civil engineering discipline.

See also Bridging the Gaps: Better Infrastructure Project Management and Civil Engineering.

The civil engineering profession intends to deliver products, services, and projects in a manner that meets or exceeds stakeholder expectations, thereby earning social trust and gaining recognition as environmental stewards. The primary vehicle for fulfilling this intent is thru projects. Therefore, the civil engineering profession will continue to focus on defining, selecting, and implementing projects geared toward improving our natural and built environment, with sustainability being a key consideration and opportunity.
The role played by the civil engineering profession in the nation's well-being requires the application of civil engineering discipline knowledge to be practiced by highly credentialed and sometimes licensed or certificated civil engineering professionals, paraprofessionals and other civil infrastructure occupationals who are knowledgeable and skilled at continuously maintaining the integrity and adequacy of both the design and project life cycle strategy in conformance with relevant professional responsibility and ethical standards. This role played by the civil engineering profession in the nation's well-being also requires civil engineering professionals to increasingly practice in conformance with established/codified sets of practices in the form of Bodies of knowledge, regulatory requirements, programmatic requirements and guidance practices. They will also operate within a practice framework of an increasingly specialized array of management plans and sub-plans supported by analytical and modeling deliverables.