A Future of Failure? The Flow of Technology Talent into Government and Civil Society

This report is an evaluation of the technology talent landscape shows a severe paucity of individuals with technical skills in computer science, data science, and the Internet or other information technology expertise in civil society and government. It investigates broadly the health of the talent pipeline that connects individuals studying or working in information technology-related disciplines to careers in public sector and civil society institutions. Barriers to recruitment and retention of individuals with the requisite skills include compensation, a perceived inability to pursue groundbreaking work, and cultural aversion to innovation

La ciencia y nosotros

Science is the most refined cultural element to describe and manage the environment. It is the result of a permanent evolutionary algorithm and represents an adaptive biological advantage for the human species. Science evolves socially through physical records and information media, whose changes influence both science and society. Information professionals have been managing these physical records or knowledge containers. The technodigital revolution grows an industrialized information society where science is a productive workforce, with a neurodigital nature, and develops as a collective enterprise. Science containers are now very changeable, plural, segmented, networking, and take on a business look: they become “specific information platforms”. Information professionals’ position is rather weak, but they have the possibility to turn into information engineers, to participate in some of those platforms and to compete individually as information managers in the science arena

The Role Of Technology and Innovation In The Framework Of The Information Society

The literature on the information society indicates that it is a still-developing field of research. It can be explained by the lack of consensus on basic definitions and research methods. There are also different judgments on the importance and the significance of the information society. Some social scientists write about a change of era, others emphasize parallelism with the past. There are some authors who expect that the information society will solve the problems of social inequalities, poverty and unemployment, while others blame it on the widening social gap between the information haves and have-nots. Various models of the information society have been developed so far and they are so different from country to country that it would be rather unwise to look for a single, all-encompassing definition. In our time a number of profound socio-economic changes are underway. Almost every field of our life is affected by the different phenomena of globalization, beside the growing role of the individual; another important characteristic of this process is the development of an organizing principle based on the free creation, distribution, access and use of knowledge and information. The 1990s and the 21st century is undoubtedly characterized by the world of the information society (as a form of the post-industrial society), which represents a different quality compared to the previous ones. The application of these theories and schools on ICT is problematic in many respects. First, as we stated above, there is not a single, widely used paradigm which has synthesized the various schools and theories dealing with technology and society. Second, these fragmented approaches do not have a fully-fledged mode of application to the relationship of ICT and (information) society. Third, SCOT, ANT, the evolutionary- or the systems approach to the history of technology – when dealing with information society – does not take into account the results of approaches (such as information science or information systems literature or social informatics, information management and knowledge management, communication and media studies) studying the very essence of the information age: information, communication and knowledge. The list of unnoticed or partially incorporated sciences, which focuses on the role of ICT in human information processing and other cognitive activities, is much longer

Outline of a multilevel approach of the network society

Social and media networks, the Internet in particular, increasingly link interpersonal, organizational and mass communication. It is argued that this gives a cause for an interdisciplinary and multilevel approach of the network society. This will have to link traditional micro- and meso-level research of social and communication ties (Rogers, Granovetter a.o.) to the macro-level research of the network society at large (Castells a.o.).\ud Systems theory linked to a theory of communicative action establishes a potential basis for a multilevel theory. The systems theory described uses elements of a biologically inspired analysis of networks as complex adaptive systems and the mathematically inspired theory of random and scale-free networks recently elaborated by Barabási, Strogatz and Watts. The outline of the multilevel theory is summarized in ten statements about changing relationships in the network society: an information society with structures and modes of organization primarily shaped by social and media networks. \ud In the last section an inventory is made of the theoretical and methodological changes communication science will have to make to develop a general theory of the information and the network society in the perspective of communication

Repositioning Information Science.

International audienceDuring the twentieth century there was a strong desire for information studies to become scientific, to move from librarianship, bibliography, and documentation to an information science. In 1968 the American Documentation Institute was renamed American Society for Information Science. By the twenty-first century, however, departments of (library and) information science had turned instead towards the social sciences, but have not been successful in providing a coherent explanation of the nature and scope of the field. The accepted view of Information Science as an emerging, scientific discipline closely tied with Information Technology and, mainly, textual data, will be challenged. Three brief presentations proposing different foundations and directions as a basis for a moderated discussion: There are other options: The development of Information Science in France has been radically different and has from the start been steeped in the humanities. The scope and focus should be broader to include, for example, the cognitive and aesthetic experiences of museum visitors? If Information Science is really concerned with influencing what people know, what kind of science can Information Science be

The scientific-educational synergy as the engine of the information society; European challenges and Ukrainian problems

The article analyzes a new image of education and science as undergoing essential transformations in the information society where both notions grow into indispensible constituents of human lifestyle and become mostly pragmatic in character. Outlined are the consequences of this irreversible process and the algorithm of an expedient response on the part of Ukrainian education to the modernity challenges is constructed

On the Impact of Information Technologies on Society: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess

The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries. In the early days of computer science it was a topic for specialists. But as computers were democratized, and the strength of chess engines began to increase, chess players started to appropriate to themselves these new tools. We show how these interactions between the world of chess and information technologies have been herald of broader social impacts of information technologies. The game of chess, and more broadly the world of chess (chess players, literature, computer softwares and websites dedicated to chess, etc.), turns out to be a surprisingly and particularly sharp indicator of the changes induced in our everyday life by the information technologies. Moreover, in the same way that chess is a modelization of war that captures the raw features of strategic thinking, chess world can be seen as small society making the study of the information technologies impact easier to analyze and to grasp

The information society progress: evolution of the Health Information Services

The health sector is an area where information society effects are being clearly visible: new technologies applied to several procedures, no barriers in communication worldwide, faster access to research and scientific information are some examples of a scenario that from now on will be irreversibly close to informational changes. Information services also reflect the effects of the information society, whether in the renewal of their powers, whether in new demands for information professionals. Taking the new paradigm of information science as the theoretical-epistemological reference of this work, the author presents the effects of the paradigmatic transition in the sector of the Health Information Services, using as interpretation framework the Frank Webstersinformation society approaches: technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural