Bridging the Gap

School districts across the country are increasingly seeking out digital tools to support the work of educators, in the hopes of improving students' academic achievement. With the rapid emergence of this new market, many districts have been challenged by the task of identifying and procuring educational technology (ed-tech) products that match the needs of their educators and students.The NYC Department of Education's "Innovate NYC Schools" division, supported by a U.S. DOE Investing in Innovation (i3) grant, aims to address this problem, in part by promoting "user-centered design," an approach that puts the needs and preferences of products' intended users (in this case, teachers, students, and parents) front and center in the development and procurement of new technology.Bridging the Gap describes the design and implementation of three Innovate NYC Schools initiatives grounded in user-centered design theory:School Choice Design Challenge (SCDC),an effort to develop apps that would help students explore and narrow down their choices of high school.#SharkTankEDU events, during which ed-tech developers present a product to a panel of educators who provide feedback on the tool.Short-Cycle Evaluation Challenges (SCEC), a classroom-based, semester-long pilot of ed-tech tools intended to inform product development, as well as the ultimate procurement decisions of school staff.The report focuses on four phases of work involved in bringing ed-tech companies and the users of their products together: defining a problem; selecting users and ed-tech companies; implementing pilot-based initiatives; and evaluating products. It describes strategies used and challenges faced, and offers practical lessons gleaned from the experiences of the individuals who designed and participated in these efforts.

The usability of open source software: analysis and prospects

Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability

Office Market Analysis: Improving Best-Practice Techniques

This article focuses on ways to improve market analysis for proposed office projects, taking time and data limitations into account. The discussion moves sequentially through the three primary components of systematic, logical market analysis: the market overview, the market study and the marketability study. Key suggestions cover: (1) discussing megatrends affecting office user preferences and product design; (2) estimating long-term attractiveness of the office location and site; (3) forecasting balance or imbalance between future demand and supply of office space at the metropolitan level; (4) segmenting and differentiating supply and demand at the submarket level for the purpose of assigning market capture rates; and (5) conducting sensitivity analysis of the key variables affecting project net operating income.

Turning Brownfields into Jobfields

A handbook for practitioners and citizens on making brownfields development work

Who participates in local government? Evidence from meeting minutes

Scholars and policymakers have highlighted institutions that enable community participation as a potential buffer against existing political inequalities. Yet these venues may bias policy discussions in favor of an unrepresentative group of individuals. To explore who participates, we compile a novel data set by coding thousands of instances of citizens speaking at planning and zoning board meetings concerning housing development. We match individuals to a voter file to investigate local political participation in housing and development policy. We find that individuals who are older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners are significantly more likely to participate in these meetings. These individuals overwhelmingly (and to a much greater degree than the general public) oppose new housing construction. These participatory inequalities have important policy implications and may be contributing to rising housing costs.Accepted manuscrip

Usability and open source software.

Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability

Community-Based Production of Open Source Software: What Do We Know About the Developers Who Participate?

This paper seeks to close an empirical gap regarding the motivations, personal attributes and behavioral patterns among free/libre and open source (FLOSS) developers, especially those involved in community-based production, and its findings on the existing literature and the future directions for research. Respondents to an extensive web-survey’s (FLOSS-US 2003) questions about their reasons for work on FLOSS are classified according to their distinct “motivational profiles” by hierarchical cluster analysis. Over half of them also are matched to projects of known membership sizes, revealing that although some members from each of the clusters are present in the small, medium and large ranges of the distribution of project sizes, the mixing fractions for the large and the very small project ranges are statistically different. Among developers who changed projects, there is a discernable flow from the bottom toward the very small towards to large projects, some of which is motivated by individuals seeking to improve their programming skills. It is found that the profile of early motivation, along with other individual attributes, significantly affects individual developers’ selections of projects from different regions of the size range.Open source software, FLOSS project, community-based peer production, population heterogeneity, micro-motives, motivational profiles, web-cast surveys, hierarchical cluster analysis

Report on the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3)

This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-point lessons and challenges pertaining to sustaining scientific software. The final and main contribution of the report is a summary of the discussions, future steps, and future organization for a set of self-organized working groups on topics including developing pathways to funding scientific software; constructing useful common metrics for crediting software stakeholders; identifying principles for sustainable software engineering design; reaching out to research software organizations around the world; and building communities for software sustainability. For each group, we include a point of contact and a landing page that can be used by those who want to join that group's future activities. The main challenge left by the workshop is to see if the groups will execute these activities that they have scheduled, and how the WSSSPE community can encourage this to happen