Eucalyptus Cloud to Remotely Provision e-Governance Applications

Remote rural areas are constrained by lack of reliable power supply, essential for setting up advanced IT infrastructure as servers or storage; therefore, cloud computing comprising an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is well suited to provide such IT infrastructure in remote rural areas. Additional cloud layers of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can be added above IaaS. Cluster-based IaaS cloud can be set up by using open-source middleware Eucalyptus in data centres of NIC. Data centres of the central and state governments can be integrated with State Wide Area Networks and NICNET together to form the e-governance grid of India. Web service repositories at centre, state, and district level can be built over the national e-governance grid of India. Using Globus Toolkit, we can achieve stateful web services with speed and security. Adding the cloud layer over the e-governance grid will make a grid-cloud environment possible through Globus Nimbus. Service delivery can be in terms of web services delivery through heterogeneous client devices. Data mining using Weka4WS and DataMiningGrid can produce meaningful knowledge discovery from data. In this paper, a plan of action is provided for the implementation of the above proposed architecture

Is Web 2.0 a threat to representative democracy? A deliberation through the Australian carbon tax debate

The influence of social media is intensifying in global societies. As the technologies become cheaper and the acceptance of Web 2.0 becomes widespread, the power of social media on citizens, particularly the integrated influence of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs cannot be underestimated. In this paper, we attempt a deliberation through the lens of carbon tax debate in Australia where the influence of social media has perhaps begun to portend the role of elected representation in this representative democracy