OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Constraint rule-based programming of norms for electronic institutions

Peer reviewedPostprin

An inter-disciplinary methodology for researching benefit-sharing as a norm diffusing in global environmental law

This paper proposes a methodology for an interdisciplinary, empirical enquiry into the diffusion of the legal concept of ‘benefit-sharing’. The paper draws together accounts of norm diffusion from sociology, international relations and law to devise a theoretical approach for the empirical research of global environmental law. Against this background, the paper explores the usefulness of process-tracing, the relevance of frames and the need for a participatory action research approach for a research project focused on benefit-sharing as a tool to operationalize equity among and within States

The normativity of code as law: towards input legitimacy

In the debate on how the new information and communication technologies impact on democratic politics the role played by the digital architecture seems to be surprisingly underrated. In particular, while a lot of attention has been paid to the possibilities that new technologies open up to democratic theory, few works have attempted to look at how democracy may help in shaping technologies. By adopting as a starting point the approach known as ‘code as law’, the paper aims at two objectives: to re-affirm the importance of discussing normative principles to guide the process of code writing in order to reinvigorate the debate; to claim the importance of input reasons when deciding which principles should be chosen. After having remarked that code is relevant for establishing democratic norms, the paper briefly tackles with the main attempts by European scholars to deal with this issue. Then, a couple of practical examples of how code impacts on democratic rights are sketched out. In the last section of the paper a shift from an output-based approach to the legitimacy of code to an input-based is openly advocated: an inquiry into the legitimacy of code should focus on its production

Open Educational Content for Digital Public Libraries

If the production of digital content for teaching -- particularly free content -- is to expand substantially, there must be mechanisms to establish a link to fame and fortune that was not perceived in a pre-digital world. How that might be done is the central question this report addresses, in the context of examining the movement for open educational content. Understanding that movement requires delving into the history of what may seem, on first pass, a totally unrelated field of endeavor. The reader's patience is requested....

Oklahoma Heart Hospital: Clinician Leaders Establish Culture of Quality

Describes strategies for a culture of quality, including a flat organizational structure, optimal nurse experience and ratios, standardization through care sets, technology-enabled feedback and assessment, and continuous improvement through new practices

Obligation Norm Identification in Agent Societies

Most works on norms have investigated how norms are regulated using institutional mechanisms. Very few works have focused on how an agent may infer the norms of a society without the norm being explicitly given to the agent. This paper describes a mechanism for identifying one type of norm, an obligation norm. The Obligation Norm Inference (ONI) algorithm described in this paper makes use of an association rule mining approach to identify obligation norms. Using agent based simulation of a virtual restaurant we demonstrate how an agent can identify the tipping norm. The experiments that we have conducted demonstrate that an agent in the system is able to add, remove and modify norms dynamically. An agent can also flexibly modify the parameters of the system based on whether it is successful in identifying a norm.Norms, Social Norms, Obligations, Norm Identification, Agent-Based Simulation, Simulation of Norms, Artificial Societies, Normative Multi-Agent Systems (NorMAS)

The Effectiveness of International Adjudicators

This chapter, in the Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication, provides an overview of the burgeoning literature on the effectiveness of international courts and tribunals (ICs). It considers four dimensions of effectiveness that have engendered debates among scholars or received insufficient scrutiny. The first dimension, case-specific effectiveness, evaluates whether the litigants to a specific dispute change their behavior following an IC ruling, an issue closely linked to compliance with IC judgments. The second variant, erga omnes effectiveness, assesses whether IC decisions have systemic precedential effects that influence the behavior of all states subject to a tribunal’s jurisdiction. The third approach, embeddedness effectiveness, evaluates the extent to which ICs anchor their judgments in domestic legal orders, enabling national actors to remedy potential treaty violations at home and avoid the need for international litigation. The fourth type, norm-development effectiveness, considers how IC decisions contribute to building a coherent body of international jurisprudence. For each type of effectiveness, the chapter reviews recent studies, identifies contested or under-analyzed issues, and suggests paths for future research