Impact in networks and ecosystems: building case studies that make a difference

open accessThis toolkit aims to support the building up of case studies that show the impact of project activities aiming to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. The case studies respond to the challenge of understanding what kinds of interventions work in the Southern African region, where, and why. The toolkit has a specific focus on entrepreneurial ecosystems and proposes a method of mapping out the actors and their relationships over time. The aim is to understand the changes that take place in the ecosystems. These changes are seen to be indicators of impact as increased connectivity and activity in ecosystems are key enablers of innovation. Innovations usually happen together with matching social and institutional adjustments, facilitating the translation of inventions into new or improved products and services. Similarly, the processes supporting entrepreneurship are guided by policies implemented in the common framework provided by innovation systems. Overall, policies related to systems of innovation are by nature networking policies applied throughout the socioeconomic framework of society to pool scarce resources and make various sectors work in coordination with each other. Most participating SAIS countries already have some kinds of identifiable systems of innovation in place both on national and regional levels, but the lack of appropriate institutions, policies, financial instruments, human resources, and support systems, together with underdeveloped markets, create inefficiencies and gaps in systemic cooperation and collaboration. In other words, we do not always know what works and what does not. On another level, engaging users and intermediaries at the local level and driving the development of local innovation ecosystems within which local culture, especially in urban settings, has evident impact on how collaboration and competition is both seen and done. In this complex environment, organisations supporting entrepreneurship and innovation often find it difficult to create or apply relevant knowledge and appropriate networking tools, approaches, and methods needed to put their processes to work for broader developmental goals. To further enable these organisations’ work, it is necessary to understand what works and why in a given environment. Enhanced local and regional cooperation promoted by SAIS Innovation Fund projects can generate new data on this little-explored area in Southern Africa. Data-driven knowledge on entrepreneurship and innovation support best practices as well as effective and efficient management of entrepreneurial ecosystems can support replication and inform policymaking, leading thus to a wider impact than just that of the immediate reported projects and initiatives

Critical success factors for activity streams' adoption in an enterprise context

Mestrado em Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoNowadays, internet is one of the main information sources. Connection between web users is the main goal provided by Social Networking Sites (SNS), such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google+ and Twitter, which assume the role of information sharing through their community users. Users can post a message or comment updates from friends or brands that they follow. Every message has a publishing mechanism called Activity Stream. Each stream is composed by an Actor, a verb and an action. An organization is a consciously coordinated social entity, with a relatively identifiable boundary, that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or a set of goals (Robbins, 1990). “Social entity” refers to an organization as a composition of people who interact with each other and with the outside world. Taking this into account, the challenge in this research project is to understand how social concepts and tools introduced by social networking sites can be implemented in an enterprise context with major relevance to the Activity Stream mechanism. To support this research project, a survey was created. This survey aims to identify critical success factors to implement Activity Streams in an enterprise context. The survey was shared through social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and through email. The target audience was Information Technology and communication professionals in Europe. The survey questions were based on a literature review about enterprise social networking platforms, Activity Streams and critical success factors to implement information systems in organizations. The main goals of this survey are to verify the feasibility to implement the Activity Stream mechanism in organizations.A Internet e as tecnologias web são atualmente uma das principais fontes geradoras de informação. Neste contexto e num momento em que a conectividade entre os cibernautas é tema dominante, as redes sociais criadas através de Social Networking Sites (SNS) (como por exemplo: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google+, Twitter) assumem cada vez mais o papel de veículo transmissor de informação a toda a comunidade de utilizadores. Os utilizadores acompanham as “atualizações” através da subscrição dos perfis de amigos e/ou páginas de interesse pessoal. As mensagens apresentadas nos Social Networking Sites (SNS) seguem um mecanismo de subscrição e publicação de atividades designado por Activity Stream. A organização é uma “entidade social conscientemente coordenada, com uma fronteira relativamente identificável, que funciona numa base relativamente contínua para alcançar um objetivo e/ou objetivos comuns” (Robbins, 1990). Assim torna-se num desafio fundamental perceber qual a aplicabilidade dos conceitos “sociais” existentes na web numa perspetiva organizacional. Para dar suporte a este projeto de investigação foi desenvolvido um inquérito com o objetivo de identificar os fatores críticos de sucesso associados à implementação de Activity Streams num contexto organizacional. O inquérito foi divulgado a profissionais nas área das Tecnologias da Informação e comunicação através das redes sociais como é o caso do LinkedIn e do Facebook e também por e-mail. As questões do inquérito baseiam-se na revisão bibliográfica efetuada acerca dos conceitos: Enterprise Social Networking, Activity Streams e Fatores Críticos de Sucesso na implementação de sistemas de informação organizacionais. Os objetivos principais do inquérito são: verificar a viabilidade da implementação de mecanismos de Activity Streams e identificar os fatores críticos de sucesso para esta implementação

An analysis of the user occupational class through Twitter content

Social media content can be used as a complementary source to the traditional methods for extracting and studying collective social attributes. This study focuses on the prediction of the occupational class for a public user profile. Our analysis is conducted on a new annotated corpus of Twitter users, their respective job titles, posted textual content and platform-related attributes. We frame our task as classification using latent feature representations such as word clusters and embeddings. The employed linear and, especially, non-linear methods can predict a user’s occupational class with strong accuracy for the coarsest level of a standard occupation taxonomy which includes nine classes. Combined with a qualitative assessment, the derived results confirm the feasibility of our approach in inferring a new user attribute that can be embedded in a multitude of downstream applications

Combining social network analysis and sentiment analysis to explore the potential for online radicalisation

The increased online presence of jihadists has raised the possibility of individuals being radicalised via the Internet. To date, the study of violent radicalisation has focused on dedicated jihadist websites and forums. This may not be the ideal starting point for such research, as participants in these venues may be described as “already madeup minds”. Crawling a global social networking platform, such as YouTube, on the other hand, has the potential to unearth content and interaction aimed at radicalisation of those with little or no apparent prior interest in violent jihadism. This research explores whether such an approach is indeed fruitful. We collected a large dataset from a group within YouTube that we identified as potentially having a radicalising agenda. We analysed this data using social network analysis and sentiment analysis tools, examining the topics discussed and what the sentiment polarity (positive or negative) is towards these topics. In particular, we focus on gender differences in this group of users, suggesting most extreme and less tolerant views among female users

Social Investment Landscape in Asia: Insights from North and South Asia

AVPN has identified the need for a comprehensive overview of the Asian philanthropy and social investment landscape to offer social investors a guide to the opportunities for social investment in Asia. The Social Investment Landscape in Asia will be an invaluable resource for funders and resource providers as they assess the opportunities and challenges for philanthropy and social investment in the region. It is designed to be a guide for both new social investors looking to enter the Asian market and existing social investorsexploring cross-border or cross-sector opportunities within the region. The Landscape is another way to further AVPN's mission to increase the flow of financial, human and intellectual capital to the Asian socialsector.The report provides a holistic view of the current and emerging philanthropy and social investment landscape in Asia. It also features in-depth profiles of 14 Asian regions which include:- An overview of key demographic and macroeconomic conditions- Key development issues facing the country- Background and context to the social economy in the region- Overview of the legislative environment- Key social investors, recent developments and investment trends- Opportunities, challenges and recommendation

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008

Removing the Digital Divide for Senior Web Users

It is hard for the elderly to use the internet to find the resource they want. Usually help is needed for them to complete the task on the technology things. The main reason for this project is to research ideas on encourage senior people to make use of the web to locate helps they want, such as finding volunteers and professional helps. The scope of this project is to develop a new way of web access and content presentation methodologies that let senior people getting help from volunteers and various service providers more easily that incorporates social networking technology e.g. Facebook. By incorporating the social network web site like Facebook into the web application, senior people will be able to find volunteering help or other related service providers through social networking. Volunteers will show up in Google map in search results for senior to easily locate helps. Senior people can also search for self help videos tutorials through the web application search engine. A mobile version of the senior user application will also be developed for easy access on the road. Other features that benefit senior users includes voice input, control / content posting and collaborative social networking where a sponsors would sponsor a help task volunteer undertake

An integrated ranking algorithm for efficient information computing in social networks

Social networks have ensured the expanding disproportion between the face of WWW stored traditionally in search engine repositories and the actual ever changing face of Web. Exponential growth of web users and the ease with which they can upload contents on web highlights the need of content controls on material published on the web. As definition of search is changing, socially-enhanced interactive search methodologies are the need of the hour. Ranking is pivotal for efficient web search as the search performance mainly depends upon the ranking results. In this paper new integrated ranking model based on fused rank of web object based on popularity factor earned over only valid interlinks from multiple social forums is proposed. This model identifies relationships between web objects in separate social networks based on the object inheritance graph. Experimental study indicates the effectiveness of proposed Fusion based ranking algorithm in terms of better search results.Comment: 14 pages, International Journal on Web Service Computing (IJWSC), Vol.3, No.1, March 201