Economic and Workforce Development Task Force Report, August 2008

The 2008 disasters devastated businesses, farms, homes, schools, non-profit institutions, entire communities, and people’s lives across the state of Iowa. The Rebuild Iowa Advisory Commission (RIAC) is charged by the Governor to guide the state’s recovery and reconstruction process. The Economic and Workforce Development Task Force is respectfully submitting this report to be included and considered in the deliberations of the RIAC. While economic and workforce development are two issues that are inextricably linked and critical to Iowa’s rebuilding strategies, each also requires extraordinary attention in determining what needs to be considered in the very immediate and longer-term recovery

CRA goes global: a good idea in the United States could use a makeover and a bigger audience

Community development

Embedded Foundations: Advancing Community Change and Empowerment

· Embedded funders are foundations that have made long-term commitments to the communities in which they are located or work. · Foundations have a long history in funding community development, often with few concrete results. · Political conditions, the increasing divide between rich and poor, inaccessibility of education, lack of housing, and continued segregation and racial discrimination are issues that need be addressed concurrently and resources need to be drawn from a variety of sources, particularly the neighborhoods themselves. This complexity has created an impetus for embedded philanthropy. · Embedded funders work participatively with the community and frame evaluations in less theoretical, more actionable ways. · While the future of embedded philanthropy remains to be seen, there is now a group of funders committed to this way of working

Innovation accelerator to make portuguese parishes smarter

Vizela, I., Costa, E., & Santos, V. (2020). Innovation accelerator to make portuguese parishes smarter. In M. Banat, & S. Paiva (Eds.), Smart Technologies for Smart Cities: EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing (pp. 3-21). (EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39986-3_1The main motivation behind this study was the need to get citizens and parish councils closer. For this purpose, an innovation accelerator to bring smartness to parishes was built. To get all insight, there was the need to learn more about public administration and smart cities and a bit more on innovation and creativity. During the research process, it was also understood that smartness inside a parish must include an improvement on the relationship with citizens, citizens who feel that their opinions count, and citizens’ training to promote digital inclusion and also for parish employees to make sure that their processes are more citizen-centered and an improvement of citizens’ quality of living inside the parish. Those issues were addressed in the final model. The obtained model was validated by a focus group, and it was concluded that the implementation of the proposed framework in a Portuguese parish is aligned with what parishes want for them in the near future.authorsversionpublishe

Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Redlining

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form of group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice

A critical approach to ICT to support participatory development of people centered smart learning ecosystems and territories

This contribution aims at fostering a collaborative effort by relevant stakeholders - policy makers, entrepreneurs, researchers, teachers, students, etc. – to critically explore the role of ICT in supporting a participatory development of people-centered "smart" learning ecosystems, able to produce social capital and to drive social innovation and territorial development. All this assuming that: a) it can help in identifying the driving factors that in the past have produced time and space singularities (eg. Renaissance, Belle Epoque, Big Deal, etc.) capable to attract people to experience a collective state of "flow”; b) the smartness of a learning ecosystems is strongly correlated with that of its region of reference; c) smartness is an emergent property of any entity that interacts with ICT infrastructures but is not fully determined by this latter. Unavoidably, all this also implies a reflection on the interplay between globality and locality and, as well, virtuality and physicality.

An innovation accelerator proposal for smart parishes

Vizela, I., Costa, E., & Santos, V. (2019). An innovation accelerator proposal for smart parishes. In Atas da Conferencia da Associacao Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informacao 2019: 19ª Conferencia da Associacao Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informacao, CAPSI 2019 [19th Conference of the Portuguese Association for Information Systems, CAPSI 2019], Lisboa; Portugal; 11 October 2019 through 12 October 2019. Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação.The key problem for this study was the need to get citizens and parish councils closer by making an innovation accelerator to bring smartness to parishes. During the research process on public administration, smart cities and a bit more on innovation and creativity, it was also understood that smartness inside a parish must include an improvement on the relationship with citizens, citizens who feel that their opinions count, citizens training to promote digital inclusion and also for parish employees to make sure that their processes are more citizen centered, and an improvement of citizens quality of living inside the parish. Those issues were addressed in the final model. The obtained conceptual framework was validated by a focus group and it was concluded that the implementation of the proposed framework in a Portuguese parish is aligned with what parishes want for them in the near future.publishersversionpublishe

An innovation accelerator proposal for smart parishes

The key problem for this study was the need to get citizens and parish councils closer by making an innovation accelerator to bring smartness to parishes. During the research process on public administration, smart cities and a bit more on innovation and creativity, it was also understood that smartness inside a parish must include an improvement on the relationship with citizens, citizens who feel that their opinions count, citizens training to promote digital inclusion and also for parish employees to make sure that their processes are more citizen centered, and an improvement of citizens quality of living inside the parish. Those issues were addressed in the final model. The obtained conceptual framework was validated by a focus group and it was concluded that the implementation of the proposed framework in a Portuguese parish is aligned with what parishes want for them in the near future

Rebuilding Evolution: A Service Science Perspective

This paper explores a simple idea and asks a simple question: What determines the speed limit of evolutionary processes, and might there be ways to speed up those processes for certain types of systems under certain conditions? Or even more simply, how rapidly can complex systems be rebuilt? To begin with, the universe can be viewed as an evolving ecology of entities. Entities correspond to types of systems - from atoms in stars to organisms on Earth to ideas in the heads of people. Service science is the study of the evolving ecology of service system entities, complex socio-technical systems with rights and responsibilities – such as people, businesses, and nations. We can only scratch the surface in this paper, but our explorations suggest this is an important research question and direction, especially as we enter the cognitive era of smart and wise service systems. For example, it takes a child multiple years of experience to learn language and basic social interactions skills, but could machine learning algorithms with the proper data sets learn those capabilities in a fraction of the time