The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Markets, Democracy, and Ethnicity: Toward a New Paradigm for Law and Development

It is by now a commonplace that we are living in a period of radical global transformation. Particularly in the developing world, this transformation has had two watchwords: markets and democracy. Indeed, the reascendant teleology of free-market democracy has redefined the very concept of underdevelopment-a term that has shed its exclusively Third World trappings and today joins in a single embrace countries from Algeria to Azerbaijan, from Pakistan to Poland. Marketization and democratization each have been the site of massive Western legal intervention in the developing world. Legal work on marketization ranges from structuring international project finance to drafting market-oriented laws to developing legal regimes that facilitate the transition from command to market economies. Work on democratization includes not only writing constitutions but also grappling with formidable issues such as the transplantability of Western social and political institutions and postcommunist state building

Ecosystemic Evolution Feeded by Smart Systems

Information Society is advancing along a route of ecosystemic evolution. ICT and Internet advancements, together with the progression of the systemic approach for enhancement and application of Smart Systems, are grounding such an evolution. The needed approach is therefore expected to evolve by increasingly fitting into the basic requirements of a significant general enhancement of human and social well-being, within all spheres of life (public, private, professional). This implies enhancing and exploiting the net-living virtual space, to make it a virtuous beneficial integration of the real-life space. Meanwhile, contextual evolution of smart cities is aiming at strongly empowering that ecosystemic approach by enhancing and diffusing net-living benefits over our own lived territory, while also incisively targeting a new stable socio-economic local development, according to social, ecological, and economic sustainability requirements. This territorial focus matches with a new glocal vision, which enables a more effective diffusion of benefits in terms of well-being, thus moderating the current global vision primarily fed by a global-scale market development view. Basic technological advancements have thus to be pursued at the system-level. They include system architecting for virtualization of functions, data integration and sharing, flexible basic service composition, and end-service personalization viability, for the operation and interoperation of smart systems, supporting effective net-living advancements in all application fields. Increasing and basically mandatory importance must also be increasingly reserved for human–technical and social–technical factors, as well as to the associated need of empowering the cross-disciplinary approach for related research and innovation. The prospected eco-systemic impact also implies a social pro-active participation, as well as coping with possible negative effects of net-living in terms of social exclusion and isolation, which require incisive actions for a conformal socio-cultural development. In this concern, speed, continuity, and expected long-term duration of innovation processes, pushed by basic technological advancements, make ecosystemic requirements stricter. This evolution requires also a new approach, targeting development of the needed basic and vocational education for net-living, which is to be considered as an engine for the development of the related ‘new living know-how’, as well as of the conformal ‘new making know-how’

A feminist action framework on development and digital technologies

This document is a guiding framework on gender, development and digital/internet rights. Borrowing from feminist theories that bring together conceptions of gender justice and economic justice, it seeks to tease out the issues and positions for feminist advocacy on digital technologies and the internet.1 As the warp and weft of all social systems change with the indelible mark of the internet and digital technologies, there is a destabilisation of norms and rules. This is true for national and global institutions – from trade, commerce, financial markets, work arrangements, etc. to social and cultural arenas of communication, media and knowledge. The flux we are witness to can be harnessed by agile feminist action into a productive space that can mark a departure from traditional norms that define social power. But for this to happen, feminists need to claim historical knowledge and build an informed framework of analysis and action. So far, a strong civil and political rights framework has led feminist actions in the digital realm. Using the normative compass that feminist conceptual tools on development offer, digital rights activism must promote an idea of gender justice that accounts for the lived experience of women at the margins of the mainstream economy. This calls for a composite approach that underscores the indivisibility and interdependency of social-economic and civil-political rights. 1 This writing draws from the work of Third World feminist networks like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and insights from personal engagement in the internet policy arena through the work of IT for Change, the organisation that the authors are associated with. This document intends to bring to feminist advocacy and action the conceptual and analytical building blocks of such an approach. It examines the substantive aspects of women’s economic, social and cultural rights, offering a new point of departure to the old idea of the “right to communicate”, bringing to the fore the idea of “cognitive justice”. Outlining why and how women’s rights in the network age requires a new conception of the right to access digital technologies, the right to knowledge and the right to development, it spells out the key “asks” in terms of national and global policies. The final section, on the directions for feminist advocacy, provides an indicative cartography of issues and spaces for action.Ford Foundatio

A School Community Needs Assessment of the Albia Community School District

v, 63 leaves. Advisor: Robert L. WhittThe problem. The purpose of this study was to present an assessment of the educational needs of the Albia Community School District as viewed by parents, voters, and civic leaders in the community, thereby aiding the Board of Education, administration, and faculty in planning the curriculum, facilities, budgets, in-service, etc. Procedure. The opinionnaire method of research was employed to determine the reactions by the parents, voters, and civic leaders. Two methods of administering the opinionnaire were used. One, a group interview technique was used with the civic groups. Secondly, a mailing technique was used to administer the opinionnaire to parents, voters, and the Chamber of Commerce. The results were analyzed by computing the average rating of each objective used in the study and arranging the objectives in order of importance according to the average rating. Thirdly, the objectives were grouped under a major heading and the ratings for the objectives were averaged. That average became the average rating for the major heading. There were sixty objectives used. They were grouped under eighteen major headings. The eighteen major objectives were ranked In order of importance according to their average ratings. Findings. The response to the opinionnaire was good. There were 74.5 percent of the participants that returned the completed opinionnaire. The emphasis of the participants seemed to center on fine arts, use of leisure time, health and safety, and family living. The major objectives' averages ranged from 3.8 to 2.9 on a five point scale where five was the highest possible score. Conclusions. The immediate purpose of the study was to provide a basis for the Albia Community School District to initiate long-range planning of philosophy, goals, and activities, facilities, etc. The study provided that basis by providing a summary of the ratings in order of importance as determined by the participants. The members of the school district feel that emphasis needs to be placed on the fine arts curriculum. In the opinion of the author of the study, the fine arts curriculum in this particular school district needs strengthened. Recommendations. The results of the study should be adopted by the Board of Education and the superintendent or his appointed edministrator should assume leadership for developing an executive committee of a cross-section of the community (including students) to begin a serious study of the curriculum of the Albia Community School District

(Mis)information, information literacy, and democracy

The current political climate is characterized by an alarming pattern of global democratic regression driven by authoritarian populist leaders who deploy vast misinformation campaigns. These offensives are successful when the majority of the population lack skills that would allow them to think critically about information in the political sphere, to identify misinformation, and therefore to fully exercise democratic citizenship. Political science has theorized the link between information and power and information professionals understand the cognitive decision-making process involved in processing information, but these two literatures rarely intersect. This paper interrogates the links between information literacy (IL) and the rise of authoritarian populism in order to advance the development of a new transtheoretical model that links political science (which studies power), information science, and critical pedagogy to suggest new paths for teaching and research. We call for a collaborative research and teaching agenda, grounded in a holistic understanding of information as power, that will contribute to achieving a more informed citizenship and promoting a more inclusive democracy

Curation-based network marketing: strategies for network growth and electronic word-of-mouth diffusion

In the last couple of years, a new aspect of online social networking has emerged, in which the strength of social network connections is based not on social ties but mutually shared interests. This dissertation studies these "curation-based" online social networks (CBN) and their suitability for the diffusion of electronic word-of-mouth information (eWOM). Within CBN, users do not rely on profiles full of personal information to identify network ``friends''. Rather, CBN users curate collections of digital content that becomes their digital self-expression within the network. This digital content can then be viewed, commented on, and shared across the pages of other CBN users. As the dissertation will show, this process of digital content curation, a relatively new online practice that centers around the collection and sharing of rich digital media, builds CBN, and presents exciting opportunities for the study of eWOM. The dissertation presents three studies around digital content curation, CBN, and eWOM diffusion. Study 1 examines individual level antecedents of digital content curation behavior. In this study, we use theory from sociology and behavioral psychology to develop a model of user intentions towards digital content curation behavior. We find that digital content curation is comprised of a mixture of social and utilitarian motivations, and that the management and organization of digital content is a major reason that people spend time on CBN. Study 2 examines the way that digital content curation behaviors grow CBN. We study a sample of 1800 CBN users to determine the way that their digital content curation behaviors attract and retain interested CBN followers. We find that the most successful CBN users are those that can generate an eWOM response around their content collections. Additionally, we find that textual eWOM plays a very limited role in attracting followers in the CBN environment. Finally, Study 3 examines eWOM diffusion by analyzing data on the structure and diffusion of digital content through real-world CBN network structures. This descriptive analysis of eWOM in CBN presents details on the way that CBN data is structured, and the methods and techniques that can be used to collect and analyze real-world eWOM collected from a CBN site. The study uses the UCINET network visualization software package to examine the networks of thirty companies operating CBN pages. Using a unique data set specifically compiled for this study, we are able to visualize the diffusion of curated digital content through the networks of these companies, and show how companies can identify their most influential followers as targets for further eWOM and traditional marketing efforts. Together, the three dissertation studies offer a holistic view of content curation behavior and curation-based online social networking and has the potential to fill the gap in the literature on information diffusion and online marketing. We make substantial contributions to the areas of sociology, economics, and marketing, and offer one of the first treatments of the role of digital content curation in online social networks