Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

Scientific and technological collaboration is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A February 2003 report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The argument of this paper is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e- Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A recent (February 2003) report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The articulation of this programmatic vision reflects a widely shared expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. The argument of this paper, however, is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e-Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Interactivity and Branding, public political communication as a marketing tool

Effective communication is essential for brands to gain awareness, interest and loyalty from their consumers; the same is as true for politics as for any manufacturer or service provider. The challenge for political parties and candidates seeking support or election is finding the means to transmit their messages to an increasingly hard to reach audience. The consumer within a political context may avoid hard news or broadcast political debate, discard any direct mail received and, when receiving glimpses of political communication, simple reject any political messages as spin and propaganda. In order that brand values are accepted and understood and accepted effective, unmediated communication is crucial and increasingly political communication strategists are turning to the Internet which can not only enable the reaching of a wider audience but can also complement and augment the brand character. As new technologies are adopted, new modes of communication are also introduced. While a website can act as a shop front from which parties or candidates can advertise their policies and personnel, the style of the site (design, language and features) can act as metaphors for the professionalism and style of representation offered. To appear modern parties are increasingly adopting Web 2.0 tools, platforms and features. These all permit, to differing degrees, users to interact with parties and candidates and have conversations across online platforms. This interactivity can, if used strategically, be used as a tool for branding a party or candidate given that the uses of such tools can be metaphors for openness, accessibility and the representational character that may be provided post election. We explore this issue drawing on original empirical data gathered through analyses of online activities during the French and US presidential contests of 2007 and 2008 and of UK parties and MPs during 2008 and 2009. Through a process of creating narratives for each of the brands analysed, based upon a content and discourse analysis of the websites and other online presences, we identify what characteristics the online shop front is designed to project. These narratives, cumulatively, suggest that the online environment is becoming a key communicational tool for those who seek election, and potentially a key source of information for the voter; thus an important location to place strategic branded information. However it appears that interactivity is better suited to the activities of candidates, nationally or locally, due to the individualistic nature of conversational interactivity. Interactivity can thus have a significant role to play within a presidential contest where the individual is seeking office, but when representatives attempt to construct their individual brand it can also challenge traditional hierarchies within party based parliamentary systems such as the UK

Privacy In The Smart Grid: An Information Flow Analysis

Project Final Report prepared for CIEE and California Energy Commissio

Engaging Citizens with Televised Election Debates through Online Interactive Replays

In this paper we tackle the crisis of political trust and public engagement with politics by investigating new methods and tools to watch and take part in televised political debates. The paper presents relevant research at the intersection of citizenship, technologies and government/democracy, and describes the motivation, requirements and design of Democratic Replay, an online interactive video replay platform that offers a persistent, customisable digital space for: (a) members of the public to express their views as they watch online videos of political events; and (b) enabling for a richer collective understanding of what goes on in these complex media events

Framing the collaborative economy - Voices of contestation

Within the context of multiple crises and change, a range of practices discussed under the umbrella term of collaborative (or sharing) economy have been gaining considerable attention. Supporters build an idealistic vision of collaborative societies. Critics have been stripping the concept of its visionary potential, questioning its revolutionary nature. In the study, these debates are brought down to the local level in search for common perceptions among the co-creators of the concept in Vienna, Austria. Towards this aim a Q study is conducted, i.e. a mixed method enabling analyses of subjective perceptions on socially contested topics. Four framings are identified: Visionary Supporters, Market Optimists, Visionary Critics, and Skeptics, each bringing their values, visions, and practical goals characteristic of different understanding of the collaborative economy. The study questions the need for building a globally-applicable definition of the concept, calls for more context-sensitivity, exploratory studies, and city-level multi-stakeholder dialogues

The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem

There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain’s ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ potential concerning every industry. However, there is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.</p