Essays on enterprise social media: moderation, shop floor integration and information system induced organizational change

The digital transformation increases the pressure on innovation capabilities and challenges organizations to adapt their business models. In order to cope with the increased competitiveness, organizations face two significant internal challenges: Enabling internal digital collaboration and knowledge sharing as well as information system-induced change. This dissertation will investigate seven related research questions divided in two main parts. The first part focuses on how an organization can foster digital knowledge exchanges and collaboration in global organizations. Enterprise social media has attracted the attention of organizations as a technology for social collaboration and knowledge sharing. The dissertation will investigate how organizations can moderate the employee discourse in such platforms from a novel organizational perspective and provide insights on how to increase the encouragement for employees to contribute and assure content quality. The developed framework will provide detailed moderation approaches. In addition, the risk of privacy concerns associated with organizational interference in the new digital collaboration technologies are evaluated. The second part of the dissertation shifts the focus to the shop floor environment, an area that has faced substantial digital advancements. Those advancements change the organizational role of the shop floor to a more knowledge work-oriented environment. Firstly, a state of research regarding technology acceptance and professional diversity is presented to create an enterprise social media job-characteristic framework. Further, a unique and longitudinal shop floor case study is investigated to derive organizational challenges for enterprise social media and potentials for empowerment. To validate the future shop floor environment needs use cases for the shop floor are derived and a user profile is established. The case study is extended by expert interviews to focus on conceptualizing organizational information systems-induced change. In this regard, the role of work practices, organizational and employee mindset and information system change are integrated into a holistic organizational change model that targets employee empowerment. This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of enterprise social media from an organizational management and shop floor perspective. It contributes to understanding new digital needs at the shop floor and the information systems-induced change journey towards digital employee empowerment

Context and Semantic Aware Location Privacy

With ever-increasing computational power, and improved sensing and communication capabilities, smart devices have altered and enhanced the way we process, perceive and interact with information. Personal and contextual data is tracked and stored extensively on these devices and, oftentimes, ubiquitously sent to online service providers. This routine is proving to be quite privacy-invasive, since these service providers mine the data they collect in order to infer more and more personal information about users. Protecting privacy in the rise of mobile applications is a critical challenge. The continuous tracking of users with location- and time-stamps expose their private lives at an alarming level. Location traces can be used to infer intimate aspects of users' lives such as interests, political orientation, religious beliefs, and even more. Traditional approaches to protecting privacy fail to meet users' expectations due to simplistic adversary models and the lack of a multi-dimensional awareness. In this thesis, the development of privacy-protection approaches is pushed further by (i) adapting to concrete adversary capabilities and (ii) investigating the threat of strong adversaries that exploit location semantics. We first study user mobility and spatio-temporal correlations in continuous disclosure scenarios (e.g., sensing applications), where the more frequently a user discloses her location, the more difficult it becomes to protect. To counter this threat, we develop adversary- and mobility-aware privacy protection mechanisms that aim to minimize an adversary's exploitation of user mobility. We demonstrate that a privacy protection mechanism must actively evaluate privacy risks in order to adapt its protection parameters. We further develop an Android library that provides on-device location privacy evaluation and enables any location-based application to support privacy-preserving services. We also implement an adversary-aware protection mechanism in this library with semantic-based privacy settings. Furthermore, we study the effects of an adversary that exploits location semantics in order to strengthen his attacks on user traces. Such extensive information is available to an adversary via maps of points of interest, but also from users themselves. Typically, users of online social networks want to announce their whereabouts to their circles. They do so mostly, if not always, by sharing the type of their location along with the geographical coordinates. We formalize this setting and by using Bayesian inference show that if location semantics of traces is disclosed, users' privacy levels drop considerably. Moreover, we study the time-of-day information and its relation to location semantics. We reveal that an adversary can breach privacy further by exploiting time-dependency of semantics. We implement and evaluate a sensitivity-aware protection mechanism in this setting as well. The battle for privacy requires social awareness and will to win. However, the slow progress on the front of law and regulations pushes the need for technological solutions. This thesis concludes that we have a long way to cover in order to establish privacy-enhancing technologies in our age of information. Our findings opens up new venues for a more expeditious understanding of privacy risks and thus their prevention

Localizing the media, locating ourselves: a critical comparative analysis of socio-spatial sorting in locative media platforms (Google AND Flickr 2009-2011)

In this thesis I explore media geocoding (i.e., geotagging or georeferencing), the process of inscribing the media with geographic information. A process that enables distinct forms of producing, storing, and distributing information based on location. Historically, geographic information technologies have served a biopolitical function producing knowledge of populations. In their current guise as locative media platforms, these systems build rich databases of places facilitated by user-generated geocoded media. These geoindexes render places, and users of these services, this thesis argues, subject to novel forms of computational modelling and economic capture. Thus, the possibility of tying information, people and objects to location sets the conditions to the emergence of new communicative practices as well as new forms of governmentality (management of populations). This project is an attempt to develop an understanding of the socio-economic forces and media regimes structuring contemporary forms of location-aware communication, by carrying out a comparative analysis of two of the main current location-enabled platforms: Google and Flickr. Drawing from the medium-specific approach to media analysis characteristic of the subfield of Software Studies, together with the methodological apparatus of Cultural Analytics (data mining and visualization methods), the thesis focuses on examining how social space is coded and computed in these systems. In particular, it looks at the databases’ underlying ontologies supporting the platforms' geocoding capabilities and their respective algorithmic logics. In the final analysis the thesis argues that the way social space is translated in the form of POIs (Points of Interest) and business-biased categorizations, as well as the geodemographical ordering underpinning the way it is computed, are pivotal if we were to understand what kind of socio-spatial relations are actualized in these systems, and what modalities of governing urban mobility are enabled

LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volum

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

State of the Art and Future Perspectives in Smart and Sustainable Urban Development

This book contributes to the conceptual and practical knowledge pools in order to improve the research and practice on smart and sustainable urban development by presenting an informed understanding of the subject to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. This book presents contributions—in the form of research articles, literature reviews, case reports, and short communications—offering insights into the smart and sustainable urban development by conducting in-depth conceptual debates, detailed case study descriptions, thorough empirical investigations, systematic literature reviews, or forecasting analyses. This way, the book forms a repository of relevant information, material, and knowledge to support research, policymaking, practice, and the transferability of experiences to address urbanization and other planetary challenges

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse