The policies of identifying and managing conflicts of interest of civil servants in the civil service

At the core of preventing and managing conflicts of interest are a set of principles that underlie the functioning of a democratic state and service of its citizens. Thus, principles such as transparency and impartiality in decision-making, the integrity of officials and keeping in mind the best interest of potential public during the decision-making, public confidence and increase his confidence in the government, form the basis of identifying policies and management of conflicts of interess or civil servants. Albanian law to prevent conflicts of interest is a law in its entirety, permeated by a spirit of somewhat stringent restrictions on civil servants. Such limitations have been given as the need to secure a decision as fair and impartial in the public interest, and the current state of the low level of public trust and confidence in the integrity of government institutions. The policy followed for identifying and managing conflicts of interest can be analyzed by doing, at first, a distinction between direct action policies in the field of conflict of interest (which are intended to prevent potential situations of conflict of interest through the specific regulatory provisions as laws and regulations) - and indirect action policies (aimed at preventing these situations by organizing public administration reform). In the context of direct action policies should distinguish between: cases in which the legislator has aimed to identify the ex - ante (before that happens) situations which could lead to conflicts of interest and cases or decisions designed to determine the important rules and non-specific prevention clause requiring verification on a case by case ex - post (as is) in order to decide whether an individual case is inconsistent with the general framework legislative described above (ie the ex-ante). Indirect action policies intended to prevent situations of conflict of interest by reforming the organizational structure of Public Administration and designed to create favorable conditions to prevent civil servants, recruited by the political institutions “to invade” the area in which administrative discretion is exercised

Semantics of trace relations in requirements models for consistency checking and inferencing

Requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements back to stakeholders and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases. Although considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements in both forward and backward directions, less attention has been paid to relating requirements with other requirements. Relations between requirements influence a number of activities during software development such as consistency checking and change management. In most approaches and tools, there is a lack of precise definition of requirements relations. In this respect, deficient results may be produced. In this paper, we aim at formal definitions of the relation types in order to enable reasoning about requirements relations. We give a requirements metamodel with commonly used relation types. The semantics of the relations is provided with a formalization in first-order logic. We use the formalization for consistency checking of relations and for inferring new relations. A tool has been built to support both reasoning activities. We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of relation types enables new relations to be inferred and contradicting relations in requirements documents to be determined. The application of requirements reasoning based on formal semantics resolves many of the deficiencies observed in other approaches. Our tool supports better understanding of dependencies between requirements

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Flexible Resolution of Authorisation Conflicts in Distributed Systems

Flexible Resolution of Authorisation Conflicts in Distributed System

Integrating Theory and Practice Into the Professional Responsibility Curriculum at the University of Texas

Teaching ethics to large classes has always proved to be a great challenge for those who teach professional responsibility at the University of Texas. A new program at the University of Texas to improve the professional responsibility curriculum is discussed

The Historical Contingencies of Conflict Resolution

This article reviews the historical contingency of theory and practice in conflict engagement. World War II and the Cold War produced adversarial, distributive, competitive, and scarce resources conceptions of negotiation and conflict resolution, as evidenced by game theory and negotiation practice. More recent and more optimistic theory and practice has focused on party needs and interests and hopes for more party-tailored, contingent, flexible, participatory and more integrative and creative solutions for more than two disputants to a conflict. The current challenges of our present history are explored: continued conflict in both domestic and international settings, the challenge of “scaling up” conflict resolution theory and the problematics of developing universal theory in highly contextualized and diverse sets of conflict sites. The limits of “rationality” in conflict resolution is explored where feelings and ethical, religious and other values may be just as important in conflict engagement and handling