Six Challenges in Platform Licensing and Open Innovation

This article describes six common challenges of design, incentives, and governance that arise in establishing platform businesses. It also proposes solutions. It considers, for example, how to open a platform to decentralized innovation yet still earn a return; how to incorporate best-of-breed innovations from different sources while avoiding problems of multi-party hold-up; and how to encourage sources of good ideas to contribute those ideas despite the risk of losing them to owners of indispensible complements. We express these issues and solutions as a reduced set of tradeoffs useful for managing information and technology property.licensing, open source, free software, dual licensing, platform, intellectual property.

An anthropological investigation of urban land development : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.A. in Social Anthropology at Massey University

The impetus for this project came from examples of neighbours' disempowerment in the land and property development process. There is a growing academic consensus that dominant approaches to land development fail to adequately address this issue. NeoMarxist approaches focus on conflict, power, and exploitation, but effectively eliminate the role of the actual developer in exercising power. Case study approaches, on the other hand, have been concerned with conflict and disempowerment, but have focused on specific instances of neighbourhood opposition and resistance. Explanation is often confined to local and national features of the social and geographical environment. These inadequacies pointed to the need to investigate the increasingly significant role that professional, entrepreneurial developers play at the nexus of the contemporary development process. An ethnographic methodology was used to provide a richer understanding of the land and property development process. The principal participants in the study are a set of 'entrepreneurial developers' operating in and around Palmerston North. Interviews, participant observation, and the examination of case studies are employed. This is complemented by an investigation of the Regulatory Procedure, including interviews with Council Officers, and examination of Council case studies. The research also uses interviews with neighbours, and a wide body of material published within the development industry. Planning for the study drew on Giddens' 'Theory of Structuration' (1979,1984) which stresses the interrelationship between the social structures of the development process, and the agency of developers. The research sought to elucidate the dominant forms of action and ideology which development agents acknowledge, and which therefore constitute the action and ideology of the development industry. The interpretation of the empirical data uses three interrelated perspectives: The first, provides a broad, industry-level, perspective on the local development industry. It asks, 'What are the major influences which shape and structure the contemporary development industry?'; The second, examines the level of action. It asks 'What are the actions of most significance to developers?', and 'What forms of conduct constitute the Institutional structures of the Regulatory Procedure?'; The third focuses on ideology. It asks, 'What are the dominant motivations which direct and influence developers' conduct?', and 'How do developers legitimate and rationalise conduct?'. An interesting aspect to the thesis is the extent to which developers share patterns of ideology, not only with each other, but also with a wider business community. Much of this characteristic ideology parallels findings in other ethnographic studies of capitalistic systems. The research highlights the fact that ethnography, and the notion of 'culture', provide an insightful and useful perspective of both the business world, and the study of development

Critical Success Factors to Improve the Game Development Process from a Developer\u27s Perspective

The growth of the software game development industry is enormous and is gaining importance day by day. This growth imposes severe pressure and a number of issues and challenges on the game development community. Game development is a complex process, and one important game development choice is to consider the developer’s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the developer’s dimension as a factor in software game success. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of the effect of key developer’s factors on the software game development process and eventually on the quality of the resulting game. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key developer’s factors for an enhanced game development process. For this study, the developed survey was used to test the research model and hypotheses. The results provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple key factors to remain competitive and to handle high pressure in the software game industry. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key developer’s factors on the game development process

Design and enhanced evaluation of a robust anaphor resolution algorithm

Syntactic coindexing restrictions are by now known to be of central importance to practical anaphor resolution approaches. Since, in particular due to structural ambiguity, the assumption of the availability of a unique syntactic reading proves to be unrealistic, robust anaphor resolution relies on techniques to overcome this deficiency. This paper describes the ROSANA approach, which generalizes the verification of coindexing restrictions in order to make it applicable to the deficient syntactic descriptions that are provided by a robust state-of-the-art parser. By a formal evaluation on two corpora that differ with respect to text genre and domain, it is shown that ROSANA achieves high-quality robust coreference resolution. Moreover, by an in-depth analysis, it is proven that the robust implementation of syntactic disjoint reference is nearly optimal. The study reveals that, compared with approaches that rely on shallow preprocessing, the largely nonheuristic disjoint reference algorithmization opens up the possibility/or a slight improvement. Furthermore, it is shown that more significant gains are to be expected elsewhere, particularly from a text-genre-specific choice of preference strategies. The performance study of the ROSANA system crucially rests on an enhanced evaluation methodology for coreference resolution systems, the development of which constitutes the second major contribution o/the paper. As a supplement to the model-theoretic scoring scheme that was developed for the Message Understanding Conference (MUC) evaluations, additional evaluation measures are defined that, on one hand, support the developer of anaphor resolution systems, and, on the other hand, shed light on application aspects of pronoun interpretation

A Service based Development Environment on Web 2.0 Platforms

Governments are investing on the IT adoption and promoting the socalled e-economies as a way to improve competitive advantages. One of the main government’s actions is to provide internet access to the most part of the population, people and organisations. Internet provides the required support for connecting organizations, people and geographically distributed developments teams. Software developments are tightly related to the availability of tools and platforms needed for products developments. Internet is becoming the most widely used platform. Software forges such as SourceForge provide an integrated tools environment gathering a set of tools that are suited for each development with a low cost. In this paper we propose an innovating approach based on Web2.0, services and a method engineering approach for software developments. This approach represents one of the possible usages of the internet of the future

Educational software design: Applying models of learning

Numerous psychological models exist which aim to explain how people learn, but the knowledge from educational theory is often missing from the design of computer‐based learning applications. This may stem from the abstract and complex nature of many learning models. In order to address this problem, there is a need for simplified models of learning which include guidelines indicating how such models can be implemented in courseware design. This paper identifies such a model, and presents a series of guidelines intended to enable courseware designers to apply educational theory to the practical design of quality computer‐based learning materials

Examining the Differences between Methodical and Amethodical ISD

This paper reports on a research program designed to investigate the differences in systems developer\u27s mental models as they develop information systems applying formal system development methods as compared to amethodicaldevelopment

Measuring the software process and product: Lessons learned in the SEL

The software development process and product can and should be measured. The software measurement process at the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has taught a major lesson: develop a goal-driven paradigm (also characterized as a goal/question/metric paradigm) for data collection. Project analysis under this paradigm leads to a design for evaluating and improving the methodology of software development and maintenance