Environmental Conflict Resolution: Strategies for Environmental Grantmakers

Outlines the strategies that are employed with the use of ECR to promote collaborative problem solving and manage disputes related to the use and development of natural resources. Includes a description of ten case studies where ECR was used effectively

A Microservice Infrastructure for Distributed Communities of Practice

Non-formal learning in Communities of Practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today’s knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically towards CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or even develop a software ecosystem to support their activities. In this paper, we describe a distributed, microservice-based Web infrastructure for non-formal learning in CoPs. It mitigates the need for central infrastructures, coordination or facilitation and takes into account the constant change of these communities. As a real use case, we implement an inquiry-based learning application on-top of our infrastructure. Our evaluation results indicate the usefulness of this learning application, which shows promise for future work in the domain of community-hosted, microservice-based Web infrastructures for learning outside of formal settings

The Evolution of an Architectural Paradigm - Using Blockchain to Build a Cross-Organizational Enterprise Service Bus

Cross-organizational collaboration and the exchange of process data are indispensable for many processes in federally organized governments. Conventional IT solutions, such as cross-organizational workflow management systems, address these requirements through centralized process management and architectures. However, such centralization is difficult and often undesirable in federal contexts. One alternative solution that emphasizes decentralized process management and a decentralized architecture is the blockchain solution of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Here, we investigate the architecture of this solution and examine how it addresses the requirements of federal contexts. We find that the solution’s architecture resembles an improvement and cross-organizational adaption of an old architectural paradigm, the enterprise service bus

Flexible coordination techniques for dynamic cloud service collaboration

The provision of individual, but also composed services is central in cloud service provisioning. We describe a framework for the coordination of cloud services, based on a tuple‐space architecture which uses an ontology to describe the services. Current techniques for service collaboration offer limited scope for flexibility. They are based on statically describing and compositing services. With the open nature of the web and cloud services, the need for a more flexible, dynamic approach to service coordination becomes evident. In order to support open communities of service providers, there should be the option for these providers to offer and withdraw their services to/from the community. For this to be realised, there needs to be a degree of self‐organisation. Our techniques for coordination and service matching aim to achieve this through matching goal‐oriented service requests with providers that advertise their offerings dynamically. Scalability of the solution is a particular concern that will be evaluated in detail

Federated Access Management for Collaborative Environments

abstract: Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner. However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Institutional Arrangements for Coordination Among Governments in Germany

The theory of fiscal federalism makes a strong case for decentralizing government functions in order to enhance the efficiency of allocating public goods where preferences differ among regions. Decentralized collective decision making fosters social and political cohesion at the level of the nation state by protecting minorities, by strengthening the accountability of politicians, and by mobilizing citizens through greater participation at the local level. Federalism respects different cultural and individual traditions among regions, and it emphasizes local diversity. Federalism thus reflects the regional dimension of democracy. However, decentralized government raises severe coordination problems. Coordination of public agencies within government—among the Executive, the Legislative, the Judicature, and the Administration—is difficult enough, yet it is further complicated in a multi-layer government framework where different authorities interact—governments and parliaments that are more or less autonomous and accountable to their respective constituencies. This may call for specific institutional provisions and rules for policy coordination and for dealing with conflicts between the levels of government. The focus of this paper is on the mechanisms of coordination as established in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) with its specific tradition of “cooperative federalism”.government; coordination; federalism; cooperative federalism; budget coordination

Strengthening Women's Access to Land into IFAD projects: The Rwanda Experience

This paper is a joint effort of IFAD and RISD to analyse and investigate women's land rights in Rwanda. It presents the outcomes of the investigation on women?s land rights and its implications in the redistribution, delimitation and registration process carried out in the Nyagatare, Gatsibo, Kayonza and Kirehe Districts in the Eastern Province. For the assessment, meetings were held in the four Districts, with IFAD project staff, beneficiaries, Cell and District Executive Secretaries, Districts Mayors, members of various men and women cooperatives, District Land Officers, members of Cell and District Land Committees