Assessing digital preservation frameworks: the approach of the SHAMAN project

How can we deliver infrastructure capable of supporting the preservation of digital objects, as well as the services that can be applied to those digital objects, in ways that future unknown systems will understand? A critical problem in developing systems is the process of validating whether the delivered solution effectively reflects the validated requirements. This is a challenge also for the EU-funded SHAMAN project, which aims to develop an integrated preservation framework using grid-technologies for distributed networks of digital preservation systems, for managing the storage, access, presentation, and manipulation of digital objects over time. Recognising this, the project team ensured that alongside the user requirements an assessment framework was developed. This paper presents the assessment of the SHAMAN demonstrators for the memory institution, industrial design and engineering and eScience domains, from the point of view of user’s needs and fitness for purpose. An innovative synergistic use of TRAC criteria, DRAMBORA risk registry and mitigation strategies, iRODS rules and information system models requirements has been designed, with the underlying goal to define associated policies, rules and state information, and make them wherever possible machine-encodable and enforceable. The described assessment framework can be valuable not only for the implementers of this project preservation framework, but for the wider digital preservation community, because it provides a holistic approach to assessing and validating the preservation of digital libraries, digital repositories and data centres

Leadership and capability development and deployment in the New Zealand State Service

This article describes the design during 2013 of a model and implementation principles of a leadership and capability development and deployment (LCDD) model for the state services system. In this process, an initial prototype model was developed to describe a desired future state. It was informed by the best traditions of state services leadership development, together with models used by the world’s best companies, such as Procter & Gamble, for leadership development (Filipkowski and Donlon, 2013). The model was then enhanced based on our research in other jurisdictions, including Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom, and co-creation with stakeholders. This is further discussed in the article. Dr Mike Pratt is Professor of Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Waikato, and a professional director and business adviser. Dr Murray Horn is a former Secretary to the Treasury of New Zealand and bank chief executive, and a professional director and business adviser

Organisational Legitimacy, Capacity and Capacity Development

The European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) has undertaken a study of capacity development, with a focus on organisational change and performance enhancement. Both individual organisations and networks of organisations have been studied with the aim of identifying important relationships among endogenous change factors (e.g. ownership, commitment and managerial style), key internal organisation variables (e.g. structures, procedures, staffing and management systems), performance and sustainability outcomes, and external environmental factors (e.g. policy frameworks, resource availability, politics, stakeholders, governance regimes, etc.).To date, the ECDPM study team has conducted 16 case studies (see Appendix). Among the findings that have emerged from several of the cases is the presence of an organisation's legitimacy as a factor contributing to successful capacity and performance. To delve in more detail into the concept of legitimacy, and to identify the implications for capacity building, ECDPM commissioned a working paper on the topic. This exploratory paper reviews the relevant literature and examines: differing definitions, types and sources of legitimacy; the links between legitimacy and organisational capacity, performance and sustainability; and management strategies for building and maintaining legitimacy. It discusses a selected set of the ECDPM cases in terms of the legitimacy concept

Chasing the Chatbots: Directions for Interaction and Design Research

Big tech-players have been successful in pushing the chatbots forward. Investments in the technology are growing fast, as well as the number of users and applications available. Instead of driving investments towards a successful diffusion of the technology, user-centred studies are currently chasing the popularity of chatbots. A literature analysis evidences how recent this research topic is, and the predominance of technical challenges rather than understanding users’ perceptions, expectations and contexts of use. Looking for answers to interaction and design questions raised in 2007, when the presence of clever computers in everyday life had been predicted for the year 2020, this paper presents a panorama of the recent literature, revealing gaps and pointing directions for further user-centred research

Developing Key Working

The Guide to Developing Key Working aims to offer guidance to those involved in developing, managing and delivering key working for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, and their families. The primary audience is commissioners and managers in local areas and in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sector implementing key working, but it is also intended to be of use for a wider range of people including policy makers and those carrying out key working functions

Trust and reputation relationships in service-oriented environments

Trust and trustworthiness plays a major role in conducting business o the internet in service-oriented environments. In defining Trust for service-oriented environments, one needs to capture the notation of service level, service agreement, context and timeslots. The same applies for reputation which is the opinion of the third party agents which is used in determining the trust and trustworthiness. Because of the complexity of the issues, and the fact that the Trust and Reputation are essentially concerns with the relationships, it is important to clearly define the notion of the trust relationships and notion of the reputation relationships. In this paper, therefore, we clearly these definitions and we introduce a graphical notation for representing these relationship

Provenance-based trust for grid computing: Position Paper

Current evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services) are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the first large-scale open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an important testing ground for problems in trust management which are likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suffer from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns in open grids, in which "community resources" are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. Against this background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems. We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics. Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for configuring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audit trails of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be offered to users and will give them a competitive edge