A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires

A supply side story for a threshold model: Endogenous growth of the free and open source community

The study of social institutions producing and disseminating knowledge has mainly concentrated on two main concepts: Science and Technology. This paper examines a recent institutional form that seems not to resemble either of the other two; that is, knowledge-intensive communities, where individuals freely exchange knowledge through information and communication technology. Using free and open source software as an example, we develop a model where this phenomenon is confronted with Technology with respect to its ability to attract researchers.

Innovation and Collective Entrepreneurship

This paper examines different forms of innovation including social innovation, and why innovation and social innovation have become important themes in public policy in a context of the increasing and diverse demands on welfare regimes, and in an era of constrained budgets. It will review different perspectives on innovation and social innovation and the dynamic interaction through collective entrepreneurship in the social and solidarity economy; bringing out process and outcome dimensions of innovation. And it will develop an understanding of the drivers and barriers to innovation, including the role of the institutional and policy framework. It will set this analysis within the context of public policy, demonstrating their role in enabling such innovations in the social and solidarity economy

Design as Code: Facilitating Collaboration between Usability and Security Engineers using CAIRIS

Designing usable and secure software is hard with- out tool-support. Given the importance of requirements, CAIRIS was designed to illustrate the form tool-support for specifying usable and secure systems might take. While CAIRIS supports a broad range of security and usability engineering activities, its architecture needs to evolve to meet the workflows of these stakeholders. To this end, this paper illustrates how CAIRIS and its models act as a vehicle for collaboration between usability and security engineers. We describe how the modified architecture of CAIRIS facilitates this collaboration, and illustrate the tool using three usage scenarios

Freeing up access to learning: the role for Open Educational Resources

The internet revolution of the last few years has had an impact on how we all live our lives. So it is not surprising that this is also a time of change in attitudes towards how we learn. Free access to information through computer networks has expanded, and part of that information flow are materials designed to help people learn. In addition there are many further online resources that help the learning process, even if that was not the original aim. However, there are risks in this evolution in access to information both for the end user, who can be confused by the options available to them, and to those involved in providing education, who may see their traditional role changing and becoming harder to perform. This situation provides the background for a growing movement to directly consider how education can be provided in a freer and more open way. This has been termed “Open Educational Resources” (OER). The exact definition of the term depends on interpretation, however a useful statement was provided as an outcome from an event organized by UNESCO in 2002 as: “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007, p4).” Arguably the only difference between an online learning object and an open educational resource is the declaration that it is open. This may be true but that turns out to be a powerful difference. By being open the content can be accessed by any learner who can do so, it can be taken and run in new contexts, it can be reworked by others and adapted for local needs (with the result shared back if desired), it can be made part of shared pool of resources, it can be the shared point of reference for collaboration, and it can be the key to building policies that work in different domain

Design as Code: Facilitating Collaboration between Usability and Security Engineers using CAIRIS

Designing usable and secure software is hard with- out tool-support. Given the importance of requirements, CAIRIS was designed to illustrate the form tool-support for specifying usable and secure systems might take. While CAIRIS supports a broad range of security and usability engineering activities, its architecture needs to evolve to meet the workflows of these stakeholders. To this end, this paper illustrates how CAIRIS and its models act as a vehicle for collaboration between usability and security engineers. We describe how the modified architecture of CAIRIS facilitates this collaboration, and illustrate the tool using three usage scenarios

A supply side story for a threshold model: Endogenous growth of the free and open source community

The study of social institutions producing and disseminating knowledge has mainly concentrated on two main concepts: Science and Technology. This paper examines a recent institutional form that seems not to resemble either of the other two; that is, knowledge-intensive communities, where individuals freely exchange knowledge through information and communication technology. Using free and open source software as an example, we develop a model where this phenomenon is confronted with Technology with respect to its ability to attract researchers

Beyond control : will blended learning subvert national curricula?

Blended Learning seems to entail a relatively innocuous set of techniques, but closer examination reveals some of these carry implicit assumptions – of constructivist philosophy, peer collaboration and situative learning – which may make their export to other countries and national cultures problematic. They also provide a route to the Internet: a storehouse of Westernised, unauthorised and anarchic content. So will Blended Learning subvert national curricula? This paper contributes to the debate by examining the milieu of national educational policy, relating it to forms of knowledge. Web 2.0 applications and Open Educational Resources are discussed in relation to the growing gap between traditional curricula and the digitally-enabled communities of mass collectivism and direct action. Blended Learning is shown to pose cultural threats, but also open opportunities, and whether these threats can be turned to advantage depends crucially upon how national policies are formulated and implemented. The conclusion poses key questions for policy-makers and practitioners. Publisher: Information Science Reference Peer-reviewed In: Ng (ed.) Comparative Blended Learning Practices and Environments. (2010

Impactful contributions of usability practitioners to open source software projects:a multiple case study

Abstract. Open source software (OSS) has been described as being designed by and for technically advanced users. As OSS has been gaining popularity among non-technical users, concern about its usability has been raised, as it is difficult for technically-minded developers to design for average users. Hiring usability experts to represent the needs of average users has been used in commercial software development as an effective solution for improving usability. It has been also suggested as a way of addressing the usability issues of OSS, but it has been observed that it is often difficult for usability experts to contribute to OSS so that their work has a major impact on the usability of the software. In this thesis, a multiple case study of four usability interventions was conducted. The cases were a part of a larger research program called UKKOSS, which aims to test ways how usability experts can meaningfully contribute to OSS by conducting usability interventions, where student teams act as usability practitioners who enter OSS projects and carry out usability work on them. This study examined how OSS developers reacted to four of those usability interventions by examining the data gathered during those interventions. The analysed data included documents, such as summary reports, communication logs, project plans, and reports on the conducted usability activities. The larger goal of studying these cases was to gather information on how usability practitioners can conduct impactful usability work on OSS projects. The outcomes of the cases were examined through the lens of prior research, and the factors that may have contributed to the success of the cases were examined through cross-case analysis. The developers welcomed the usability work of the usability teams in generally all of the four cases, but the actual impacts the interventions had varied from none of the suggested usability changes being implemented to most of them being implemented to the software. The outcomes of the most successful cases suggest that an approach where usability practitioners implement their suggested changes themselves after discussing about them with the core developers, establishing trust with the developers by contacting them via voice call or video conferencing instead of using only asynchronous communication, and making usability reports as persuasive as possible by including user testing metrics which strengthen the validity of the issues, should be studied further to evaluate if they can have a positive effect on the impact of the work of usability practitioners. The main contributions of this research were supporting the prior research on the obstacles faced by usability experts entering OSS projects by supporting it with empirical evidence and proposing new areas of research on the subject based on the outcomes of the cases

Improving Laboratory Learning Outcomes: An Investigation Into the Effect of Contextualising Laboratories Using Virtual Worlds and Remote Laboratories.

This thesis presents research into improving learning outcomes in laboratories. It was hypothesised that domain specific context can aid students in understanding the relationship between a laboratory (as a proxy for reality), the theoretical model being investigated within the laboratory activity and the real world. Specifically, the research addressed whether adding domain context to a laboratory activity could improve students' ability to identify the strengths and limitations of models as predictors of real-world behaviour. The domain context was included in a laboratory activity with the use of a remote radiation lab set within a context-rich virtual world. The empirical investigation used a pretest-posttest control group design to assess whether there was a statistically significant difference in the learning outcome between a treatment group who completed the lab in a contextualised virtual world, and the control group who conducted the activity in an empty virtual world. The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences between the groups and therefore there are cases where contextualising a laboratory activity will not have an effect on students' ability to identify the strengths and limitations of models as predictors of real-world behaviour. This research postulates that previous exposure to the model, the level of awareness students had of the context and the lack time available for reflection may have masked or attenuated the effect of the context. This research has contributed a framework for the analysis and design of domain context in laboratory activities, and an interface for integrating iLabs laboratories into the Open Wonderland virtual world. It has explicitly clarified the relationship between context, labs, models and the real world. Most significantly, this research has contributed knowledge to the field of laboratory learning outcomes and the understanding of how domain context affects laboratory activities