Open Digital Forms

International audienceThe maintenance of digital libraries often passes through physical paper forms. Such forms are tedious to handle for both senders and receivers. Several commercial solutions exist for the digitization of forms. However, most of them are proprietary, expensive, centralized, or require software installation. With this demo, we propose a free, secure, and lightweight framework for digital forms. It is based on HTML documents with embedded JavaScript, it uses exclusively open standards, and it does not require a centralized architecture. Our forms can be digitally signed with the OpenPGP standard, and they contain machine-readable RDFa. Thus, they allow for the semantic analysis, sharing, re-use, or merger of documents across users or institutions

Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem

In this paper, we focus on digital curb cuts created during the pandemic: improvements designed to increase accessibility that benefit people beyond the population that they are intended to help. As much as 86% of civil legal needs are unmet, according to a 2017 study by the Legal Services Corporation. Courts and third parties designed many innovations to meet the emergency needs of the pandemic: we argue that these innovations should be extended and enhanced to address this ongoing access to justice crisis. Specifically, we use the Suffolk University Law School\u27s Document Assembly Line as a case study. The Document Assembly Line rapidly automated more than two dozen court processes, providing pro se litigants remote, user-friendly, step-by-step guidance in areas such as domestic violence protection orders and emergency housing needs and made them available at courtformsonline.org. The successes of this project can extend beyond the pandemic with the adoption of an open-source, open-standards ecosystem centered on document and form automation. We give special attention to the value of integrated electronic filing in serving the needs of litigants, a tool that has been underutilized in the non-profit form automation space because of complexities and the difficulty in obtaining court cooperation

Uniform: The Form Validation Language

Digital forms are becoming increasingly more prevalent but the ease of creation is not. Web Forms are difficult to produce and validate. This design project seeks to simplify this process. This project is comprised of two parts: a logical programming language (Uniform) and a web application. Uniform is a language that allows its users to define logical relationships between web elements and apply simple rules to individual inputs to both validate the form and manipulate its components depending on user input. Uniform provides an extra layer of abstraction to complex coding. The web app implements Uniform to provide business-level programmers with an interface to build and manage forms. Users will create form templates, manage form instances, and cooperatively complete forms through the web app. Uniform’s development is ongoing, it will receive continued support and is available as open-source. The web application is software owned and maintained by HP Inc. which will be developed further before going to market

Towards an understanding of how and why Design Science Research scholars evaluate

As digital technology becomes embedded in the core of customer offerings and business operations, companies find themselves being part of dynamic networks and must develop more open and distributed innovation processes. This is due to the organization of digital innovation depends on some unique properties of digital technology as well as the structure of digital products. However, important and mature industrial domains, such as the automotive sector, find it difficult to fully utilize digital technologies because of a long tradition of closed innovation processes and hierarchical product structures. Therefore, automotive companies try to attract external software start-ups by establishing more open organisational forms, e.g. BMW has established the Start-Up Garage and Mercedes-Benz has launched the Mercedes-Benz Challenge to attract creative programmers. Yet, the understanding for the problems they solve, how the organizational interventions should be designed and their effects are uncertain. Therefore, the goal of this research project is to build knowledge of how the automotive industry can accelerate digital innovation by mindfully select and design appropriate organisational interventions for open digital innovation. In this research in progress paper, we present a two-year action design research project and contribute with initial results on empirical knowledge about the problems for open digital innovation in the automotive industry, a comparison, based on a literature review, between organizational forms for open digital innovation as well as an assessment of the organizational forms’ potential to overcome the problems. The next step is to detail design and implement an organizational intervention to facilitate a first iteration of externally initiated innovation cases

Collaborative pedagogy and digital scholarship: a case study of 'Media Culture 2020'

This paper presents an educational case study of ‘Media Culture 2020’, an EU Erasmus Intensive Programme that utilised a range social media platforms and computer software to create open, virtual spaces where students from different countries and fields could explore and learn together. The multi-disciplinary project featured five universities from across Europe and was designed to develop new pedagogical frameworks to encourage collaborative approaches to teaching and learning in the arts. The main objective of the project was to break down classroom and campus walls by creating digital learning environments that facilitated new forms of production, transmission and representation of knowledge. Media Culture 2020 was designed to pilot a novel mode of ‘blended learning’, demonstrating a number of ways in which ‘Web 2.0’ networked technologies might be adopted by academics to encourage open and collaborative modes of practice. The project utilised a number of social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Google Hangout, Google Docs and Blogger) to enhance the learning experiences of a diverse set of students from different cultural and international contexts. In doing so, Media Culture 2020 enabled participants with a diverse range skills and cultural experiences to develop new working practices that respond to the convergence of digital media and art, as well as the internationalisation of media production and business, through the use of open, interactive software

Bridging the Gap: Connecting Authors to Museum and Archival Collections

This project improves the ability of multimedia authors to interact with the digital collections of museums, archives, and libaries, thereby enhancing experimentation in new forms of humanities scholarship. The project envisions development of an open sources bridge between a widely used digital asset management system (CONTENTdm) and applications that support the Open Knowledge Initiative's standard for interoperability, including open source, multimedia authoring tools. In a collaborative scholarly endeavor, we will use this software bridge to develop a multimedia presentation on the Pacific Northwest Artist Carl Hall (1921-1996) that directly incorporates images and audio from museum and archival digital collections

Open budget data: mapping the landscape

This report offers analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has begun to gain traction amongst advocates and practitioners of financial transparency. Issues and initiatives associated with the emerging issue of open budget data are charted in different forms of digital media. The objective is to enable practitioners – in particular civil society organisations, intergovernmental organisations, governments, multilaterals and funders – to navigate this developing field and to identify trends, gaps and opportunities for supporting it. How public money is collected and distributed is one of the most pressing political questions of our time, influencing the health, well-being and prospects of billions of people. Decisions about fiscal policy affect everyone - determining everything from the resourcing of essential public services, to the capacity of public institutions to take action on global challenges such as poverty, inequality or climate change. Digital technologies have the potential to transform the way that information about public money is organised, circulated and utilised in society, which in turn could shape the character of public debate, democratic engagement, governmental accountability and public participation in decision-making about public funds. Data could play a vital role in tackling the democratic deficit in fiscal policy and in supporting better outcomes for citizens

Digital literacies for employability- fostering forms of capital online

The web has revolutionised the world of knowledge and created new literacies practices to operate in a mediated world. In doing so, it has reinvented the workplace, the skills, attitudes and values individual attribute to contemporary forms of communication as a form of learning, living and working in a digital society.This article provides a reflection of digital literacies as forms of capitals that can be acquired, enhanced or transformed online. The article also discusses how this conceptualisation of digital literacies as capitals were applied to the design of an open online course (MOOC) focused on digital literacies for employability. Finally, the article provides recommendations regarding the development and deployment of digital literacies as a key area of learning

La esfera pública digital y el activismo político

The development of digital technologies has fostered basic transformations in the public sphere, reflected in the typology of media outlets, forms of organization, orientation of actions, and its increasingly globalised scale. These transformations open up new possibilities for political activism, taking profit from the opportunities offered by globalization. The new forms of activism include amplified digital activism, innovative digital activism and recursive digital activism.El desarrollo de las tecnologías digitales ha impulsado transformaciones fundamentales en la esfera pública, que se manifiestan en la tipología de los medios, las formas de organización, la orientación de las acciones y su escala cada vez más globalizada. Estos cambios, a su vez, han abierto nuevas posibilidades para el activismo político, que aprovechan las oportunidades ofrecidas por la digitalización. Las nuevas formas de activismo incluyen el activismo digital ampliado, el activismo digital innovador y el activismo digital recursivo