Worship & sightseeing: building a partnership approach to a ministry of welcome

This paper explores diverse opportunities for partnerships between the sacred and secular at religious sites. It identifies ways in which tourism suppliers can work collaboratively with sacred sites to enable sites to meet the demands of contemporary secular and sacred stakeholders. In the review of contemporary literature we consider supply and demand issues, site management, key components of partnership, ecumenical co-creation resources, cost-benefit and marketing needs. The paper is predicated on the provision of information and interpretation services for guidance, and development of all of these services. Methodologically, a participant observation approach was employed to confirm that tourism fits the strategic intent of religious leaders. We consider that partnership at a national, diocesan and parish level is an important part in effective tourism development. Elements of community involvement; capacity building and in-community development through engaging stakeholders are discussed. The balance achieved between stakeholders is important, and in our context the balance between local government and the tourism industry, and between active partners and the passive policy community, reflects the aims of the sacred and the private sector key partners, and the wider social capacity building aspects of community development agendas and government

Towards a middleware for generalised context management

It is widely accepted in the Pervasive Computing community that contextual interactions are the key to the delivery of truly calm technology. However, there is currently no easy way to incorporate contextual data into an application. If contextual data is used, it is generally in an ad hoc manner, which means that developers have to spend time on low-level details. There have been many projects investigating this area, however as yet none of them provide support for all of the key issues of dynamic composition and flexible representation of contextual information as well as the problems of scalability and adaptability to environmental changes. In this paper we present the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure (SCI), a middleware infrastructure for discovery, aggregation, and delivery of context information

Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface

This paper synthesizes recent insights from geography, science and technology studies and related disciplines concerning organizations and organizational learning at the science-policy interface. The paper argues that organizations do not exist and evolve in isolation, but are co-produced through networked connections to other spaces, bodies and practices. Furthermore, organizations should not be studied as stable entities, but are constantly in-the-making. This co-productionist perspective on organizations and organizing has implications for how geographers theorize, study and intervene in organizations at the science-policy interface with respect to encouraging learning and change and in the roles we adopt within and around such organizations

Asian Varieties of Service Capitalism?

There is currently only limited empirical research and theoretical conceptualisation of the role of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in the economies of Asia within economic geography or elsewhere in the wider social scientific literature. This paper argues that existing theoretical understandings of KIBS are inadequate to conceptualise the nature of ongoing KIBS development in Asian economies – both emerging and mature – and seeks to address this absence by developing a theoretical framework that draws on a range of existing theoretical approaches within and beyond economic geography. To do this, it proposes the concept of ‘service capitalism’, developed from work concerned with varieties of capitalism (VoC), variegated capitalism and advanced service industries. The paper elaborates its theoretical argument by presenting research into two forms of Asian service capitalism through two case studies examining respectively the specific nature of Japanese KIBS and the development of KIBS in China. Using the case studies, it demonstrates how service industry development in both these Asian economies exhibits distinctive characteristics that are a consequence of both local institutional, corporate, and socio-cultural contexts but are also interconnected the wider global economy in complex ways. The paper thus presents a significant and disruptive challenge to existing theories of KIBS development as based on the western experience, and contemporary deployments of the varieties of capitalism and variegated capitalism approaches

Evaluation of the Community Asset Transfer Programme: Stage 3 Interim evaluation, Final report

CMI was commissioned by the Big Lottery Fund to undertake a longitudinal evaluation of the Community Asset Transfer Programme. The evaluation accompanies the programme over eight years in order to capture what outcomes and impacts are achieved through the 16 funded projects. This is the third of four evaluation stages. This evaluation report is aimed at the wider Community Asset Transfer community in Wales where there has been strong interest in the Community Asset Transfer agenda in recent years. The 16 original CAT 1 projects are an important showcase for what can be achieved in different settings and using different approaches

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning