Web 2.0 as syndication

There is considerable excitement about the notion of 'Web 2.0', particularly among Internet businesspeople. In contrast, there is an almost complete lack of formal literature on the topic. It is important that movements with such energy and potential be subjected to critical attention, and that industry and social commentators have the opportunity to draw on the eCommerce research literature in formulating their views

Survey of End-to-End Mobile Network Measurement Testbeds, Tools, and Services

Mobile (cellular) networks enable innovation, but can also stifle it and lead to user frustration when network performance falls below expectations. As mobile networks become the predominant method of Internet access, developer, research, network operator, and regulatory communities have taken an increased interest in measuring end-to-end mobile network performance to, among other goals, minimize negative impact on application responsiveness. In this survey we examine current approaches to end-to-end mobile network performance measurement, diagnosis, and application prototyping. We compare available tools and their shortcomings with respect to the needs of researchers, developers, regulators, and the public. We intend for this survey to provide a comprehensive view of currently active efforts and some auspicious directions for future work in mobile network measurement and mobile application performance evaluation.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. arXiv does not format the URL references correctly. For a correctly formatted version of this paper go to http://www.cs.montana.edu/mwittie/publications/Goel14Survey.pd

How Copyright Drives Innovation: A Case Study of Scholarly Publishing in the Digital World

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Cloudy in guifi.net: Establishing and sustaining a community cloud as open commons

Commons are natural or human-made resources that are managed cooperatively. The guifi.net community network is a successful example of a digital infrastructure, a computer network, managed as an open commons. Inspired by the guifi.net case and its commons governance model, we claim that a computing cloud, another digital infrastructure, can also be managed as an open commons if the appropriate tools are put in place. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and sustainability of community clouds as open commons: open user-driven clouds formed by community-managed computing resources. We propose organising the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud service layers as common-pool resources (CPR) for enabling a sustainable cloud service provision. On this basis, we have outlined a governance framework for community clouds, and we have developed Cloudy, a cloud software stack that comprises a set of tools and components to build and operate community cloud services. Cloudy is tailored to the needs of the guifi.net community network, but it can be adopted by other communities. We have validated the feasibility of community clouds in a deployment in guifi.net of some 60 devices running Cloudy for over two years. To gain insight into the capacity of end-user services to generate enough value and utility to sustain the whole cloud ecosystem, we have developed a file storage application and tested it with a group of 10 guifi.net users. The experimental results and the experience from the action research confirm the feasibility and potential sustainability of the community cloud as an open commons.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enabling High Data Throughput in Desktop Grids Through Decentralized Data and Metadata Management: The BlobSeer Approach

International audienceWhereas traditional Desktop Grids rely on centralized servers for data management, some recent progress has been made to enable distributed, large in- put data, using to peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols and Content Distribution Networks (CDN). We make a step further and propose a generic, yet efficient data storage which enables the use of Desktop Grids for applications with high output data re- quirements, where the access grain and the access patterns may be random. Our solution builds on a blob management service enabling a large number of con- current clients to efficiently read/write and append huge data that are fragmented and distributed at a large scale. Scalability under heavy concurrency is achieved thanks to an original metadata scheme using a distributed segment tree built on top of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). The proposed approach has been imple- mented and its benefits have successfully been demonstrated within our BlobSeer prototype on the Grid'5000 testbed

The use of mobile phones for human rights protection: the experiences of Zimbabwean Human Rights Non-Governmental Organisations

New technologies are emerging as a key part of the struggles for social change. In Africa, social change activists are increasingly relying on mobile phones to organise and mobilise protests for social change and to protect citizens from violence. Zimbabwe has experienced a long history of human rights violations stretching from the times of Rhodesia to post-coalition years. The violations have been in various forms, including the use of physical force and the constriction of political, media and electoral spaces. Human Rights NGOs, as part of civil society, have challenged the state over the violations in various ways, including through traditional and new media channels. Using case studies, namely the Zimbabwe Peace Project, (ZPP), Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA, Zimbabwe) and the Election Resource Centre (ERC), the research investigates the potential of the mobile phone as a tool for contesting the constriction of media freedom, information access, freedom of expression and citizens’ right to human dignity, to life, political choice and free movement and association. The research is based on findings from interviews conducted between 2014 and 2016 with Zimbabwean human rights activists as well as from document analysis. The study established that the phone is a key tool through which NGOs and community activists (or volunteers) are offering protection to citizens by documenting, reporting and disseminating evidence of violence. It is also playing a significant role in legal interventions for victims of violence. Further, the device is empowering citizens to educate themselves about voting and mobilising for elections. Mobile technology is also facilitating the production of community media which is giving marginalised communities voices and opportunities to contribute towards, or participate in local and national dialogue and development. Equally important, it is opening pathways through which NGOs and human rights defenders are able to challenge state institutions that undermine the rule of law and justice. Finally, the study also established that in the face of legal, surveillance, interception and censorship strategies by the state, NGOs are mobilising networks, collaborative campaigns and circumvention and mobile-phone-mediated education and information tools to counter these strategies and tactics. The research is thus significant in terms of struggles from below in the context of new technologies for human rights and democratisation

Data management in dynamic distributed computing environments

Data management in parallel computing systems is a broad and increasingly important research topic. As network speeds have surged, so too has the movement to transition storage and computation loads to wide-area network resources. The Grid, the Cloud, and Desktop Grids all represent different aspects of this movement towards highly-scalable, distributed, and utility computing. This dissertation contends that a peer-to-peer (P2P) networking paradigm is a natural match for data sharing within and between these heterogeneous network architectures. Peer-to-peer methods such as dynamic discovery, fault-tolerance, scalability, and ad-hoc security infrastructures provide excellent mappings for many of the requirements in today’s distributed computing environment. In recent years, volunteer Desktop Grids have seen a growth in data throughput as application areas expand and new problem sets emerge. These increasing data needs require storage networks that can scale to meet future demand while also facilitating expansion into new data-intensive research areas. Current practices are to mirror data from centralized locations, a technique that is not practical for growing data sets, dynamic projects, or data-intensive applications. The fusion of Desktop and Service Grids provides an ideal use-case to research peer-to-peer data distribution strategies in a hybrid environment. Desktop Grids have a data management gap, while integration with Service Grids raises new challenges with regard to cross-platform design. The work undertaken here is two-fold: first it explores how P2P techniques can be leveraged to meet the data management needs of Desktop Grids, and second, it shows how the same distribution paradigm can provide migration paths for Service Grid data. The result of this research is a Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Data-Intensive Cycle Sharing (ADICS) that is capable not only of distributing volunteer computing data, but also of providing a transitional platform and storage space for migrating Service Grid jobs to Desktop Grid environments

Reorientating social learning: an ethnographic exploration of metacognition and critical discourse in farmer discussion groups

This PhD project explored whether, how and why social learning was promoted through the peer-to-peer interactions of seven farmer discussion groups (FDGs) throughout South West England. Social learning theory provided the conceptual frame for the study, building on Bandura’s original theory focused on cognitive development and self-regulation through interaction with one’s environment (in the form of behaviour modelling by role models) to incorporate metacognitive outcomes through self-reflexivity. The role of the facilitator was also explored within the context of the groups. Conducted using an ethnographic methodology, participant observation was carried out at each group’s monthly or quarterly meetings as well as semi-structured interviews with the five facilitators / coordinators and nineteen farmer participants (as well as familial partners in the business where possible). All FDGs were found to exhibit behaviour modelling in the course of their interactions and participant engagement in observational learning. This related to the element of role modelling, which was important throughout the groups as well in terms of who was modelling the behaviours and the impact that had on the observers’ attention, motivation and self-efficacy to learn (cognitively process, retain and potentially produce the behaviour) from her or him. The extent to which the various groups’ interactions promoted self-reflexivity by the participants differed, however, due to their varying engagement in critical discourse. That element was found to be highly influential in promoting metacognition, but its emergence was dependent on the different groups’ ecologies for collaborative learning supporting those norms for interaction, highlighting nuances in trust amongst groups with strong bonding social capital. The facilitators of those learning processes were found to play a vital role in supporting the groups’ ecologies to incorporate critical discourse, social learning and metacognition. The findings therefore suggest that certain elements should be present if collaborative learning processes intend to promote social learning