Open Government Architecture: The evolution of De Jure Standards, Consortium Standards, and Open Source Software

Conducted for the Treasury Board of Québec, this study seeks to present recent contributions to the evolution, within an enterprise architecture context, of de jure and de facto standards by various actors in the milieu, industrial consortia, and international standardization committees active in open source software. In order to be able to achieve its goals of delivering services to citizens and society, the Government of Québec must integrate its computer systems to create a service oriented open architecture. Following in the footsteps of various other governments and the European Community, such an integration will require elaboration of an interoperability framework, i.e. a structured set of de jure standards, de facto standards, specifications, and policies allowing computer systems to interoperate. Thus, we recommend that the Government of Québec: Pursue its endeavours to elaborate an interoperability framework for its computer systems that is based on open de jure and de facto standards. This framework should not only reflect the criteria enumerated in this study and apply to internal computer systems, but it should also extend to Web services supplied to organizations outside of the government. This framework should explicitly prioritize open source de jure and de facto standards and include a policy covering free software. The interoperability framework should initially draw on that of the state of Massachusetts. In the medium term, is should be as comprehensive as that of the British government. Integrate this interoperability framework into its enterprise architecture. Publish this interoperability framework with its enterprise architecture. Specify this interoperability framework in its calls for tenders. Elaborate a policy of compliance with this framework for all new applications.

Hermeneutical Resources Beyond The Male/Female Binary: Epistemic Injustice And The Advent Of A Third Categorical Gender

This thesis uses the concepts of epistemic injustice (injustice related to an individual’s relationship with the shared pool of social knowledge) and hermeneutical resources (conceptual tools, primarily based in language, that are used to understand and express lived experience) to examine how well a third categorical gender redresses the harms caused by the male/female binary. The first chapter discusses the ways medicine reproduces cultural norms regarding gender, focusing in particular on the resulting epistemic injustices. The second chapter looks at the ways the advertising and entertainment sectors of the culture industry (a term coined by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1944) distribute hermeneutical resources surrounding gender, along with the new resources becoming available with the emergence of a nonbinary gender category into the public eye. The overall argument of this thesis is that while a third gender category may be beneficial to many who do not identify as male or female, it continues to perpetuate epistemic injustice insofar as it upholds the discursive representation of gender as internally-generated, acontextual, and immutable

Internet Filtering in China 2004-2005

China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel. It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent. We sought to determine the degree to which China filters sites on topics that the Chinese government finds sensitive, and found that the state does so extensively. Chinese citizens seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will frequently find themselves blocked. Contrary to anecdote, we found that most major American media sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, are generally available in China (though the BBC remains blocked). Moreover, most sites we tested in our global list's human rights and anonymizer categories are accessible as well. While it is difficult to describe this widespread filtering with precision, our research documents a system that imposes strong controls on its citizens' ability to view and to publish Internet content. This report was produced by the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership among the Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Programme at Cambridge University, the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

Open Source Software for Integrated Library System : Relative Appropriatness in the Indian Context

Libraries in all fields of human activity are involved in collection, preservation, management, and effective distribution of information that determines the quality of development in concerned sectors including that of higher education and research. Now information is flooding and along with that the recorded information to be managed; which necessitates automation of libraries to make the information stored in their collections useful and retrievable. Hitherto the cost of commercial packages for automation has prevented millions of libraries from using those tools. The recent emergence of Open Source Software has drastically reduced the cost of automation as well provided tools for new and innovative information services. The present research work focuses on comparative study of library automation packages with stress to appropriateness of Open Source Integrated Library Systems (OSILS) for countries like India. Study is based on a survey among library professionals from India using commercial and OSILS packages. The sample users belong to 601 libraries covering university, college, school, special and research libraries using any one of the integrated library systems. Packages covered is limited to the software /versions used in India. The survey found that features users of library automation packages consider are cost effectiveness, technical infrastructure, staff skills, software functionality and the availability of support, documentation and community. Study revealed that OSILS provides technological freedom and so is changing the landscape of library automation. Survey found Koha to be most popular in India. Suggests solutions to improve the situation. Few recommendations are provided to help libraries to choose suitable OSILS by understanding their advantages. Opines that being an attractive alternative to costly commercial package for any type of libraries OSILS, which is free to experiment and easy to use and customize for local requirements needs to be promoted in Indian libraries

Shrimping under working conditions

We propose that mutated forms of death are emerging with neoliberalism’s biopolitical financialisation of life. Thinking of such forms as commercial extinction and social death, how do we begin to frame these outside of a quantified rhetoric of surplus? These questions aim to provoke a discussion about these terms that can be interpreted as modes of exhaustion, while maintaining particular biological, social or economic conditions of life. When we are confronted with capitalism’s failure to fulfil resource exhaustion, a model of conservation by dispossession1 might emerge within what Rosi Braidotti calls “new and subtler degrees of death and extinction” (2013, 115). In this text we want to think with other conditions of death and extinction that can help to move beyond the missing item of an inventory, a carved rock along a fossil road or a set of pre-emptive actions to be executed beyond a certain threshold. Thus, we ask if there could be figures, which rather than narrating death as a biological or geological concept, open it up to other equally violent forces that are nevertheless materially situated. More importantly, will we ever be able to think of extinction beyond ideas of absence or frame death from social or economic realms as an emerging mode of living? In order to address many of these questions we dissect a critical example of extinction, that of the brown shrimp (Crangon crangon) as it flips between commercial (albeit not yet biotic) death in the ex-fishing grounds of the South East corner of the UK, and the social death embedded in the labour-power of the ex-processing factories of the Special Economic Zones of Tangier and Tetuan in Morocco

Erasure

How does erasure execute knowledge production? The following is a tour through a collection of erasure that provides a glimpse into the many directions that this question may take us, through the lens of a series of artistic interventions, academic research, experiments and artefacts. I present these items from a collector’s point of view. For achieving completion of this collection of erasures would be, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, like death. That is to say that the desire to complete the series, to achieve the perfection of its imaginary ending, is that which creates the elusive object of desire. As such, in the same way that a collection can always extend itself laterally, or spark a new one ([1968] 1996, 113), I am presenting it as an object of desire, fuelled by the impetus of neoliberal growth, which can never be complete and will forever expand into new meanings of execution, always towards the elusive erasure of death

The Long and Short of IT: The International Development Research Centre as a Case Study for a Long-term Digital Preservation Strategy

This thesis is a contribution to the study of the challenges facing archivists and record managers working on the long-term management and preservation of digital records. This thesis discusses the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian government Crown agency, as a case study. In 2004 IDRC's Resarch Information Management Service (RIMS) Division was given the responsibility for developing a digital preservation program for the centre's final reports and related documentation. To facilitate this work, it hired a student intern to research recommendations for a digital preservation strategy. My research as the centre's intern led to the following recommendations for IDRC: Choose file formats that are ubiquitous, non-proprietary (when possible), viable, and lossless; Implement a strategy of conversion and migration of file formats and media as they become obsolete; Capture metadata to support the preservation of and access to digital objects; and Comply with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model. Much academic study by archivists on digital preservation focuses on the concepts relating to digital records and records management. This thesis offers a practical institutional example of one effort to develop an actual archival program.Master of Arts in Archival Studie