Digital Transitions: Nonprofit Investigative Journalism: Evaluation Report on the Center for Public Integrity

Summarizes outcomes of a one-year grant to CPI to transform itself into a leader in digital nonprofit journalism. Examines CPI's track record, use of new tools and methods, capacity as an effective and credible online presence, and areas for improvement

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Outlines a community education movement to implement Knight's 2009 recommendation to enhance digital and media literacy. Suggests local, regional, state, and national initiatives such as teacher education and parent outreach and discusses challenges

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

What Drives Volunteers to Accept a Digital Platform That Supports NGO Projects?

Technology has become the driving force for both economic and social change. However, the recruitment of volunteers into the projects of non-profit-making organizations (NGO) does not usually make much use of information and communication technology (ICT). Organizations in this sector should incorporate and use digital platforms in order to attract the most well-prepared and motivated young volunteers. The main aim of this paper is to use an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to analyze the acceptance of a technological platform that provides a point of contact for non-profit-making organizations and potential volunteers. The TAM is used to find the impact that this new recruitment tool for volunteers can have on an ever-evolving industry. The TAM has been extended with the image and reputation and visual identity variables in order to measure the influence of these non-profit-making organizations on the establishment and implementation of a social network recruitment platform. The data analyzed are from a sample of potential volunteers from non-profit-making organizations in Spain. A structural equation approach using partial least squares was used to evaluate the acceptance model. The results provide an important contribution to the literature about communication in digital environments by non-profit-making organizations as well as strategies to improve their digital reputation

Investigating situated cultural practices through cross-sectoral digital collaborations: policies, processes, insights

The (Belfast) Good Friday Agreement represents a major milestone in Northern Ireland's recent political history, with complex conditions allowing for formation of a ‘cross-community’ system of government enabling power sharing between parties representing Protestant/loyalist and Catholic/nationalist constituencies. This article examines the apparent flourishing of community-focused digital practices over the subsequent ‘post-conflict’ decade, galvanised by Northern Irish and EU policy initiatives armed with consolidating the peace process. Numerous digital heritage and storytelling projects have been catalysed within programmes aiming to foster social processes, community cohesion and cross-community exchange. The article outlines two projects—‘digital memory boxes’ and ‘interactive galleon’—developed during 2007–2008 within practice-led PhD enquiry conducted in collaboration with the Nerve Centre, a third-sector media education organisation. The article goes on to critically examine the processes involved in practically realising, and creatively and theoretically reconciling, community-engaged digital production in a particular socio-political context of academic-community collaboration

Financial reporting websites : what users want in terms of form and content

Web-based financial reporting varies widely. Our research had three objectives: (1) identify design attributes for Web-based financial reporting; (2) rank those attributes; and (3) pilot test the Web as a survey tool. Sixty-one attributes were developed from prior studies. The subjects were the subscribers of the “Double Entries” email newsletter. In terms of completeness, the respondents suggested seven additional attributes. Regarding the second objective, some surprises were found. For example, the Jenkins Report emphasizes forward-looking information; yet, the respondents rated traditional content higher than forward-looking information. Traditional static attributes were rated higher than dynamic attributes. In terms of presentation, the respondents were moderately adverse to downloading files, gave relatively low ratings to “bells and whistles,” preferred hyperlinks and other navigation aids such tables of content over search and query functions. Regarding the third objective, the response rate was 13.2%, which was at the low end of response rates reported by similar projects.Los reportes financieros basados en la web varían ampliamente. Nuestra investigación tenía tres objetivos: (1), identificar los atributos de diseño para la elaboración de reportes financieros basados en la web; (2), separarlos por categorías, y (3), hacer pruebas piloto de esta web como una herramienta de estudio. Sesenta y un atributos se desarrollaron de estudios previos. Los sujetos fueron los suscriptores del boletín de correo electrónico “Entradas dobles”. En términos de integridad, los encuestados sugirieron siete atributos adicionales. Con respecto al segundo objetivo, se encontraron algunas sorpresas. Por ejemplo, el Informe Jenkins hace hincapié en la información prospectiva, aunque los encuestados valoraron más el contenido original que esta información. Los atributos tradicionales estáticos fueron major valorados que los atributos dinámicos. En términos de presentación, los encuestados se mostraron moderadamente negativos a la descarga de archivos, valoraron escasamente las “campanas y silbatos”, prefirieron los hiperenlaces y otras ayudas de navegación como tablas de contenido sobre las funciones de búsqueda y consulta. En lo referente al tercer objetivo, el ratio de respuesta fue 13.2%, el cual se halla al extremo bajo de las tasas de respuesta notificadas por proyectos similares

Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1

Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences

VCU Media Lab

We propose the establishment of a VCU Media Lab – a professional creative media technology unit whose mission is to support the development, design, production and delivery of innovative media, multimedia, computer-based instruction, publications and tools in support of VCU education, research and marketing initiatives. This centrally administered, budgeted and resourced facility will acknowledge, refine, focus and expand media services that are currently being provided at VCU in a decentralized manner