Digital Transitions: Nonprofit Investigative Journalism: Evaluation Report on the Center for Public Integrity

Summarizes outcomes of a one-year grant to CPI to transform itself into a leader in digital nonprofit journalism. Examines CPI's track record, use of new tools and methods, capacity as an effective and credible online presence, and areas for improvement

Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Media Corporations: Incorporating Human Rights Through Rankings, Self-Regulation and Shareholder Resolutions

This article examines the emergence and evolution of selected ranking and reporting frameworks in the expanding realm of business and human rights advocacy. It explores how indicators in the form of rankings and reports evaluating the conduct of transnational corporate actors can serve as regulatory tools with potential to bridge a global governance gap that often places human rights at risk. Specifically, this article examines the relationship of transnational corporations in the Internet communications technology sector (ICT sector) to human rights and the risks presented to the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy when ICT sector companies comply with government demands to disclose user data or to conceal information users seek. Specifically, it explores the controversial role of transnational ICT corporations in state censorship and surveillance practices. The article explains how conflicts over corporate complicity in alleged abuses served to catalyze change and lead to the creation of the Global Network Initiative, a private multi-stakeholder project, and the Ranking Digital Rights Initiative, an industry independent market-based information effort. Both aim to promote more responsible business practices in the social media industry sector. In conclusion, the article argues that regulating corporate reporting of information relevant to assessing the potential for adverse human rights impacts is necessary

What Drives Volunteers to Accept a Digital Platform That Supports NGO Projects?

Technology has become the driving force for both economic and social change. However, the recruitment of volunteers into the projects of non-profit-making organizations (NGO) does not usually make much use of information and communication technology (ICT). Organizations in this sector should incorporate and use digital platforms in order to attract the most well-prepared and motivated young volunteers. The main aim of this paper is to use an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to analyze the acceptance of a technological platform that provides a point of contact for non-profit-making organizations and potential volunteers. The TAM is used to find the impact that this new recruitment tool for volunteers can have on an ever-evolving industry. The TAM has been extended with the image and reputation and visual identity variables in order to measure the influence of these non-profit-making organizations on the establishment and implementation of a social network recruitment platform. The data analyzed are from a sample of potential volunteers from non-profit-making organizations in Spain. A structural equation approach using partial least squares was used to evaluate the acceptance model. The results provide an important contribution to the literature about communication in digital environments by non-profit-making organizations as well as strategies to improve their digital reputation

German crowd-investing platforms: Literature review and survey

This article presents a comprehensive overview of the current German crowd-investing market drawing on a data-set of 31 crowd-investing platforms including the analysis of 265 completed projects. While crowd-investing market still only represents a niche in the German venture capital market, there is potential for an increase in both market volume and in average project investment. The market share is distributed among a few crowd-investing platforms with high entry barriers for new platforms although platforms that specialise in certain sectors have managed to successfully enter the market. German crowd-investing platforms are found to promote mainly internet-based enterprises (36%) followed by projects in real estate (24%) and green projects (19%), with the median money raised 100,000 euro

Technology entrepreneurship and value creation on open innovation platforms

This dissertation studies how entrepreneurial firms create economic value from open source technology platforms, interfaces on which firms disclose knowledge and distribute innovation for free without retaining any proprietary rights. Despite their increasing importance in innovation and growing popularity among profit-seeking new ventures, open source platforms present a major challenge for value creation, as they lack price signals to guide ventures’ transactions and forfeit ventures’ control over key resources and knowledge for innovation. Those features are in contrast with the fundamental assumption about price and revenue in economics. They also run counter to the central tenet in strategy research that private knowledge and rare resources are central to competitive advantage and profiting from innovation. To address this puzzle about value creation from free technologies base on free knowledge and resources, this dissertation specifically focus on the economic implications of strategies ventures can leverage within and across open source development communities. Chapter I reviews the literature relevant to entrepreneurship in an open and inter-dependent innovation environment. Exploring research opportunities emerged from the literature review, Chapter II explores the possibility that multihoming, a critical growth strategy of ventures as open source complementors in platform competition, allows ventures to reinforce their existing user base – a prerequisite of value creation from open source. Chapter III directly addresses value creation by investigating how collaborating with external contributors, another critical open source strategy, influences venture capital investment. Both essays highlight how platform network effects unfold without price signals and proprietary rights of the technologies in shaping the outcome for ventures’ strategies. They also emphasize those strategies’ demand side implications on users, participants on another side of open source platforms. The empirical analyses of this dissertation are based on multiple open source technologies platforms, with data obtained from on GitHub, the worlds’ largest open source software storage provider, containing 5 Terabytes of information on 2.1 million ventures, 96 million technologies and over 2 billion development activities, under research designs for deriving causal references. Overall, the dissertation seeks to advance the understanding of value creation in entrepreneurship through open source platforms, an increasingly important phenomenon in contemporary economy.Managemen

Online advertising: analysis of privacy threats and protection approaches

Online advertising, the pillar of the “free” content on the Web, has revolutionized the marketing business in recent years by creating a myriad of new opportunities for advertisers to reach potential customers. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure composed of a variety of intermediary entities and technologies whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded behind the scenes at an unprecedented rate. Despite the enormous value of online advertising, however, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prompt serious privacy concerns. This article surveys the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting technologies, and presents a thorough overview of the underlying privacy risks and the solutions that may mitigate them. We first analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising. In particular, we examine the main components of the advertising infrastructure in terms of tracking capabilities, data collection, aggregation level and privacy risk, and overview the tracking and data-sharing technologies employed by these components. Then, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and compare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and impact on the Web.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Research in multi-cultural relationship building

This study aims to explore the ‘missing gap' between the values of an Accounting firm and the preference shown by Maaori on how they would like to be approached when wanting to build a trusted relationship within a business sense. This study makes use of qualitative approaches in which data is collected primarily through interviews and analysed to produce results and recommendations. The study found that Maaori would like to be approached in a way that makes sense to them and also identifies with their cultural proceedings. It also provides insight into how important trust is when establishing a relationship with Maaori. The study recommends that further studies conducted should interview a wider variety of focus groups to add different elements to this research and that FIRM A's small business department's offerings do not align with what Maaori want so need to be rethought to adapt to Maaor expectations