The Little Book of Public Space and the Internet of Things

Our public spaces are changing, they are at the forefront of a technological revolution yet this is a revolution that often remains hidden from sight. Sensors are being installed and the ability to interact with objects in our spaces – from projects such as the PETRAS Talking Trees through to conversations with Lamp Posts or data interactions with local wildlife is changing our interactions both in and with these places and spaces. This Little Book explores safety and security and moves onto maintenance. We then look at some of the issues affecting people and explore health, community building and culture while exploring the use of public space for play. After this, we explore conservation and culture, transport and signage, accessibility and then, finally, we discuss future trends

Business models for the operation of Mobility-as-a-Service solutions

Digitalization is reshaping the conventional transportation industry boundaries and it is important to understand which disruptive opportunities emerge. In this study, it is explained an alternative service than the current mobility offer, a concept named as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). It consists on transportation from A to B through a subscription plan in which the user plans, books, manages and pays in one single platform, that integrates diverse mobility partners. The empirical purpose of this research is to understand the distinct business models to implement MaaS based on common characteristics of current MaaS projects, implemented in different cities. To address the research problem, the following questions are asked: What are different business models already on the market to operate MaaS? Is it possible to identify different types? Which factors seems to influence the choice of a certain type? In order to answer these research questions, I use a multiple case study methodology. First by analyzing various scientific articles and MaaS projects presentations, specific to each city. Secondly, by collecting empirical data through semi-structured interviews from Mobility-as-a- Service Industry experts. My research determines that MaaS implementation is tailored to the city and a combination of challenges influences its operation. It concludes that the most influential factor for operating MaaS is the level of government support. This thesis finalizes providing a checklist for MaaS implementation.A digitalização está a reformular os limites do setor do transporte convencional e é importante entender quais as oportunidades disruptivas que surgem com ela. Nesta dissertação, é introduzida uma alternativa ao atual serviço de mobilidade, conceito denominado como Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). Consiste na mobilidade de A para B, através de um plano de subscrição no qual o usuário planeia, reserva, gere e paga numa única plataforma, que integra diversos parceiros de mobilidade. O objetivo empírico desta pesquisa é entender os diferentes modelos de negócios para implementar MaaS, com base em características comuns dos projetos atuais, implementados em diferentes cidades. Para responder às questões de investigação, são colocadas as seguintes perguntas: Quais são os diferentes modelos de negócios já existentes no mercado para operar MaaS? É possível identificar diferentes tipos? Quais os fatores que parecem influenciar a escolha e aptidão de um determinado tipo? Para responder às questões anteriormente mencionadas, utilizei uma metodologia adequada para estudar múltiplos casos. Primeiro, analisando vários artigos científicos e apresentações de projetos relativos a MaaS, específicos para cada cidade. Em segundo lugar, recolhendo dados por meio de entrevistas semiestruturadas, feitas a especialistas do setor de Mobility-as-a- Service. Através da minha pesquisa, determina-se que não só a implementação de MaaS é personalizada a cada cidade, mas há também diversos desafios que influenciam a sua implementação. Conclui-se que o nível de apoio do governo é o fator mais influente para a operação e implementação de MaaS numa cidade. Esta tese finaliza ao proporcionar uma checklist para implementação de MaaS

Blogging the hyperlocal : the disruption and renegotiation of hegemony in Malta

This thesis examines how blogging is being deployed to disrupt institutional hegemony in Malta. The island state is an example of a hyperlocal context that includes strong political, ecclesiastical and media institutions, advanced take-up of social technologies and a popular culture adjusting to the promise of modernity represented by EU membership. Popular discourse is dominated by political partisanship and advocacy journalism, with Malta being the only European country that permits political parties to directly own broadcasting stations.The primary evidence in this study is derived from an analysis of online texts during an organic crisis that eventually led to a national referendum to consider the introduction of divorce legislation in Malta. Using netnography supplemented by critical discourse analysis, the research identifies a set of strategies bloggers used to resist, challenge and disrupt the discourse of a hegemonic alliance that included the ruling political party, the Roman Catholic Church and their media. The empirical results indicate that blogging in Malta is contributing to the erosion of the Church’s hegemony. Subjects that were previously marginalised as alternative are increasingly finding an online outlet in blog posts, social media networks and commentary on newspaper portals.Nevertheless, a culture of social surveillance together with the natural barriers of size and the permeability of the social web facilitates the appropriation of blogging by political blocs, who remain vigilant to the opportunity of extending their influence in new media to disrupt horizontal networks of information exchange. Blogging is increasingly operating as a component of a hybrid media ecosystem that thrives on reflexive cycles of entertainment: the independent newspaper media, for long an active partner in the hegemonic set up in Malta, are being transformed and rendered more permeable at the same time as their power and influence are being eroded. The study concludes that a new episteme is more likely to emerge through the symbiosis of hybrid media and reflexive waves of networked individualism than systemic, organised attempts at online political disruption

Privacy in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles

To prepare for the age of the intelligent, highly connected, and autonomous vehicle, a new approach to concepts of granting consent, managing privacy, and dealing with the need to interact quickly and meaningfully is needed. Additionally, in an environment where personal data is rapidly shared with a multitude of independent parties, there exists a need to reduce the information asymmetry that currently exists between the user and data collecting entities. This Article rethinks the traditional notice and consent model in the context of real-time communication between vehicles or vehicles and infrastructure or vehicles and other surroundings and proposes a re-engineering of current privacy concepts to prepare for a rapidly approaching digital future. In this future, multiple independent actors such as vehicles or other machines may seek personal information at a rate that makes the traditional informed consent model untenable. This Article proposes a two-step approach: As an attempt to meet and balance user needs for a seamless experience while preserving their rights to privacy, the first step is a less static consent paradigm able to better support personal data in systems which use machine based real-time communication and automation. In addition, the article proposes a radical re-thinking of the current privacy protection system by sharing the vision of “Privacy as a Service” as a second step, which is an independently managed method of granular technical privacy control that can better protect individual privacy while at the same time facilitating high-frequency communication in a machine-to-machine environment

The New News: Journalism We Want and Need

Economic pressures on one hand and continuing democratization of news on the other have already changed the news picture in Chicago, as elsewhere in the U.S. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times are in bankruptcy, and local broadcast news programs also face economic pressures. Meanwhile, it seems every week brings a new local news entrepreneur from Gapers Block to Beachwood Reporter to Chi-Town Daily News to Windy Citizen to The Printed Blog.In response to these changes, the Knight Foundation is actively supporting a national effort to explore innovations in how information, especially at the local community level, is collected and disseminated to ensure that people find the information they need to make informed decisions about their community's future. The Chicago Community Trust is fortunate to have been selected as a partner working with the Knight Foundation in this effort through the Knight Community Information Challenge. For 94 years, the Trust has united donors to create charitable resources that respond to the changing needs of our community -- meeting basic needs, enriching lives and encouraging innovative ways to improve our neighborhoods and communities.Understanding how online information and communications are meeting, or not, the needs of the community is crucial to the Trust's project supported by the Knight Foundation. To this end, the Trust commissioned the Community Media Workshop to produce The New News: Journalism We Want and Need. We believe this report is a first of its kind resource offering an inventory and assessment of local news coverage for the region by utilizing the interactive power of the internet. Essays in this report also provide insightful perspectives on the opportunities and challenges

Hyperlocal Community Media Audiences: An Ethnographic Study of Local Media Spaces and Their Place in Everyday Life

Hyperlocal media is a form of online, alternative community media created by citizens to service their locality. To date, much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on editorial practice, non-UK contexts, or frames these practices as response to receding mainstream local journalism and concerns of civic engagement. In this study I take a different approach, exploring instead the everyday, functional and social contexts which are established in the audience’s highly participatory use of hyperlocal Facebook Pages. I conceptualise such spaces as fields which are integrated both in the individual user’s media ideology, but also amongst a wider sense of overlapping fields of local information and socialites, both online and offline. This work emerges from ethnographic studies of two hyperlocal communities in the West Midlands, in which information was gathered through participant observation, interview, and via an innovative Community Panel approach. I argue that Facebook Pages play a key role for many people in engaging with their neighbourhoods, but not exclusively so, as I demonstrate their place amongst other sources of information and social life. The Pages benefit from being mediated by their editors to create online spaces that welcome participation partly shaped by the audience’s engagement and contribution, thus creating alternative streams of local information that challenge agendas set out by mainstream media. These become integrated into the everyday practices of the audience, therefore, care must be taken to recognise to what extent the broader experience of the neighbourhood is represented in such online practices, and I argue that certain narratives and discourses of the locality are contributed to and constructed online, and not always helpfully so, as in depictions of crime. Where the audience might challenge such depictions, and hold authority to account (the police, for example), this public sphere ideal is not typically acted through. Whilst this does not bode well for the literature’s hopes for political or civic engagement, this thesis demonstrates that audiences develop such spaces in their own vision, to enact and share a capital of local knowledge and information, sometimes innovating in their own ways using mobile technologies in order to do so. This thesis concludes by saying that such online spaces demonstrate the role of media technologies in everyday life, and the extent to which they are perpetuated and maintained by practitioners and their increasingly capable and enabled audiences

Special issue - Beyond clickbait and commerce: The ethics, possibilities and challenges of not-for-profit media

This special issue of Ethical Space explores the ethical dilemmas arising in the turbulent journalistic environment created by digital transformation and its impact on the traditional media business model

Are smart innovation ecosystems really seeking to meet citizens’ needs? Insights from the stakeholders’ vision on smart city strategy implementation

The concept of a smart city is becoming the leading paradigm worldwide. Consequently, a creative mix of emerging technologies and open innovation is gradually becoming the defining element of smart city evolution, changing the ways in which city administrators are organizing their services and development globally. Thus, the smart city concept is becoming extremely relevant on the agendas of policy-makers as a development strategy for enhancing the quality of life of the citizen and improving the sustainability goals of their cities. Despite of the relevance of the topic, still few studies investigate how open innovation shapes the way cities become smarter or focus on the experiences of professionals to understand the concept of a smart city and its implementation. This paper fills this gap and analyzes the processes for building effective smart cities by integrating the different perspectives of smart innovations and using the core components of smart cities according to a conceptual framework developed in previous research. In so doing, it provides useful insights for smart city stakeholders in adopting social and technological innovation to improve the global competitiveness of their cities. The empirical dataset allows examining how “smart cities” are being implemented in Manchester (UK), and in Boston, Massachusetts, and San Diego City (United States of America (USA)), including archival data and in-depth interviews with core smart city stakeholders who are involved in smart city projects and programs across the cases. Results from empirical data suggest that the conceptualization of smart cities across the cases is similar with a strong emphasis on social and technological innovation aimed at addressing municipal challenges in the core sub-systems of the cities, which include mobility, environmental sustainability, entrepreneurial development, quality of life, and social cohesion. The results also reveal benefits and challenges relating to smart innovation ecosystems across the cases and the future directions of their diffusion

“On the margins”: a qualitative analysis of independent hyperlocal news through a subcultural lens

This thesis adopts a little used subcultural lens for a qualitative investigation of selective UK independent hyperlocal publishers. Drawing on the biographical tradition of Robert Park of the Chicago School and the subsequent work on subcultures, it gives voice to 27 independent operators whose narrative of their everyday publishing activities evidences a variety of themes. These include the emergence of independent hyperlocal publishing as a result of a crisis in mainstream local newspapers. This crisis was the result of a combination of factors: the disruption of the internet, centralisation strategies which distanced local newspapers from communities and finally the effects of the economic downturn. The thesis considers how independent publishers, operating on the margins of the local news ecosystem, have retrieved and repurposed aspects of the mainstream and put them to good use; frequently reinventing working practices discarded by the ‘parent culture’. Changes to the research field during the study period are also included to show a sector both organising and professionalising itself, while re-negotiating its relationship with mainstream organisations. This is in line with the notion that subcultures can ‘travel’ (Hebdige, 2014: 9) as they evolve. To contextualise narratives, three further interviews were included with representatives of philanthropic organisations which have helped independent publishing gain a foothold in the local news ecosystem. The thesis includes a high degree of autobiographical inscription by acknowledging the journalistic background of the author. The overall research strategy is a subjective, inductive approach based on the feminist tradition of open-ended, one-to-one interviews. The methodological approach is Grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Corbin and Strauss, 2015; Birks and Mills, 2015)

Paths to Innovation in Supply Chains: The Landscape of Future Research

This chapter presents a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for supply chain and it is the result of an intensive work jointly performed involving a wide network of stakeholders from discrete manufacturing, process industry and logistics sector to put forward a vision to strengthen European Supply Chains for the next decade. The work is based on matching visions from literature and from experts with several iterations between desk research and workshops, focus groups and interviews. The result is a detailed analysis of the supply chain strategies identified as most relevant for the next years and definition of the related research and innovation topics as future developments and steps for the full implementation of the strategies, thus proposing innovative and cutting-edge actions to be implemented based on technological development and organisational change