Self-awareness for dynamic knowledge management in self-adaptive volunteer services

Engineering volunteer services calls for novel self-adaptive approaches for dynamically managing the process of selecting volunteer services. As these services tend to be published and withdrawn without restrictions, uncertainties, dynamisms and 'dilution of control' related to the decisions of selection and composition are complex problems. These services tend to exhibit periodic performance patterns, which are often repeated over a certain time period. Consequently, the awareness of such periodic patterns enables the prediction of the services performance leading to better adaptation. In this paper, we contribute to a self-adaptive approach, namely time-awareness, which combines self-aware principles with dynamic histograms to dynamically manage the periodic trends of services performance and their evolution trends. Such knowledge can inform the adaptation decisions, leading to increase in the precision of selecting and composing services. We evaluate the approach using a volunteer storage composition scenario. The evaluation results show the advantages of dynamic knowledge management in self-adaptive volunteer computing in selecting dependable services and satisfying higher number of requests

Building Capacity Through a Regranting Strategy: Promising Approaches and Emerging Outcomes

This is an evaluation report on the Community Leadership Project (CLP) in which 27 well-established intermediary organizations--community foundations, grantmaking public charities, and funder affinity groups--regrant to smaller organizations to provide financial support and tailored organizational assistance and coaching to small to mid-size organizations; technical assistance; and leadership development.The evaluation is interested in understanding not only the impact of CLP on leaders, organizations, intermediaries, and foundation partners, but also the key lessons on: (1) reaching and providing capacity-building supports to organizations and leaders serving low-income communities and communities of color; (2) characteristics of effective, culturally relevant, and community-responsive capacity building; and (3) which kinds of capacity-building supports are most effective for small and mid-sized organizations serving low-income communities and communitiesof color

Clinical governance, education and learning to manage health information

Purpose – This paper aims to suggest that the concept of clinical governance goes beyond a bureaucratic accountability structure and can be viewed as a negotiated balance between imperfectly aligned and sometimes conflicting goals within a complex adaptive system. On this view, the information system cannot be separated conceptually from the system of governance it supports or the people whose work it facilitates or hinders. Design/methodology/approach – The study, located within the English National Health Service (NHS) between 1999 and 2005, is case study based using a multi method approach to data collection within two primary care organisations (PCOs). The research strategy is conducted within a social constructionist ontological perspective. Findings – The findings reflect the following broad-based themes: mutual adjustment of a plurality of stakeholder perceptions, preferences and priorities; the development of information and communication systems, empowered by informatics; an emphasis on education and training to build capacity and capability. Research limitations/implications – Limitations of case study methodology include a tendency to provide selected accounts. These are potentially biased and risk trivialising findings. Rooted in specific context, their generalisability to other contexts is limited by the extent to which contexts are similar. Reasonable attempts were made to minimise any bias. The diversity of data collection methods used in the study was an attempt to counterbalance the limitations highlighted in one method by strength from alternative techniques. Practical implications – The paper makes recommendations in two key governance areas: education and learning to manage health information. In practice, the lessons learned provide opportunities to inform future approaches to health informatics educational programmes. Originality/value – With regard to topicality, it is suggested that many of the developmental issues highlighted during the establishment of quality improvement programmes within primary care organisations (PCGs/PCTs) are relevant in the light of current NHS reforms and move towards commissioning consortia

Emergency Services Workforce 2030

Australia’s emergency management sector sits within an environment that is becoming ever more complex, dynamic and uncertain. This is due to factors like a growing population, changing climate, social and cultural change, and the impact of new technologies. At the same time, the nature of how we work, in both paid and voluntary ways, is also changing. Work is greatly influenced by changes in technology and lifestyle, and by increasing levels of interconnectivity and cross-boundary collaboration. In this dynamic context, planning for the sustainability, effectiveness and wellbeing of the future emergency management workforce takes on considerable importance. The workforces of Australia’s fire, emergency services and rural land management agencies (referred to in this report as emergency service organisations) are crucial to Australia’s emergency management capability. These workforces include career and volunteer members, they also include first responders as well as professional, technical, and administrative support staff and volunteers (hereafter referred to collectively as the emergency service workforce). This report provides a consolidated, overview picture of emerging workforce challenges and opportunities likely to face emergency service organisations over the coming decade. It is a first step in bringing together the wide range of research that can inform and strengthen strategic workforce planning in these organisations. The report presents a high-level summary of key trends and developments highlighted in research from beyond the emergency management sphere. It identifies potential implications of these trends and developments for the future emergency service workforce. It also highlights key Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) affiliated research that can assist workforce planners to understand and respond to these implications. The bulk of the combined emergency service workforce are volunteers. According to the Productivity Commission, there were around 212,293 fire service volunteers and 23,897 state and territory emergency service volunteers across emergency service organisations in Australia in 2017-18 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). Volunteers therefore formed around 91% of the fire service workforce, and 97% of the state and territory emergency service workforce in that year. Furthermore, given the geographic size, changing risk profile, and demographic shifts in Australia, a heavy reliance on volunteers is likely to continue into the future. As such, volunteers and volunteering issues form a key component of the terrain covered in this report. While focusing on the emergency service workforce, this report is also based on recognition that the emergency services are part of a wider emergency management workforce that is also diverse and changing. The complete emergency management workforce extends far beyond the emergency services to include the volunteer and paid workforces of not-for-profits active in recovery, local governments, wider community sector and faith-based organisations, government departments, private businesses and more. Increasingly, under the influence of changing community expectations, and policy goals of community resilience, shared responsibility, and clear risk ownership (COAG, 2011; Commonwealth of Australia, 2018), ‘unaffiliated’ community members and groups are also recognised as a valuable part of the emergency management workforce (AIDR, 2017). Consequently, the future emergency management workforce is not going to be restricted to the affiliated volunteer and paid workforces of formal emergency service organisations. Therefore, this report considers the future emergency service workforce within the context of how it interacts with and forms a part of the wider emergency management workforce

Emergency Services Workforce 2030: Changing work literature review

The Changing Work Literature Review collates a high-level evidence base around nine major themes related to internal workforce management approaches and working environments of fire, emergency service, and rural land management agencies. It is an output of the Workforce 2030 project and is one of two literature reviews that summarise the research base underpinning a high-level integrative report of emerging workforce challenges and opportunities, Emergency Services Workforce 2030. Workforce 2030 aimed to highlight major trends and developments likely to impact the future workforces of emergency service organisations, and their potential implications. The starting point for the project was a question: What can research from outside the sphere of emergency management add to our knowledge of wider trends and developments likely to shape the future emergency services workforce, and their implications? The Changing Work Literature Review focuses on nine themes relevant to changes that have implications for emergency service organisation’s internal workforce management approaches and working environments: 1) Recruitment, assessment, and selection, 2) Socialisation and training, 3) Work design, 4) Diversity and inclusion, 5) Managing mental health and wellbeing, 6) Leadership, 7) Change management, 8) Managing an ageing workforce, and 9) Managing volunteer workforces

Engineering self-awareness with knowledge management in dynamic systems: a case for volunteer computing

The complexity of the modem dynamic computing systems has motivated software engineering researchers to explore new sources of inspiration for equipping such systems with autonomic behaviours. Self-awareness has recently gained considerable attention as a prominent property for enriching the self-adaptation capabilities in systems operating in dynamic, heterogeneous and open environments. This thesis investigates the role of knowledge and its dynamic management in realising various levels of self-awareness for enabling self­adaptivity with different capabilities and strengths. The thesis develops a novel multi-level dynamic knowledge management approach for managing and representing the evolving knowledge. The approach is able to acquire 'richer' knowledge about the system's internal state and its environment in addition to managing the trade-offs arising from the adaptation conflicting goals. The thesis draws on a case from the volunteer computing, as an environment characterised by openness, heterogeneity, dynamism, and unpredictability to develop and evaluate the approach. This thesis takes an experimental approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the of the dynamic knowledge management approach. The results show the added value of the approach to the self-adaptivity of the system compared to classic self­adaptation capabilities

Self-aware computing systems:from psychology to engineering

At the current time, there are several fundamental changes in the way computing systems are being developed, deployed and used. They are becoming increasingly large, heterogeneous, uncertain, dynamic and decentralised. These complexities lead to behaviours during run time that are difficult to understand or predict. One vision for how to rise to this challenge is to endow computing systems with increased self-awareness, in order to enable advanced autonomous adaptive behaviour. A desire for self-awareness has arisen in a variety of areas of computer science and engineering over the last two decades, and more recently a more fundamental understanding of what self-awareness concepts might mean for the design and operation of computing systems has been developed. This draws on self-awareness theories from psychology and other related fields, and has led to a number of contributions in terms of definitions, architectures, algorithms and case studies. This paper introduces some of the main aspects of self-awareness from psychology, that have been used in developing associated notions in computing. It then describes how these concepts have been translated to the computing domain, and provides examples of how their explicit consideration can lead to systems better able to manage trade-offs between conflicting goals at run time in the context of a complex environment, while reducing the need for a priori domain modelling at design or deployment time