Assessing technical candidates on the social web

This is the pre-print version of this Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 IEEEThe Social Web provides comprehensive and publicly available information about software developers: they can be identified as contributors to open source projects, as experts at maintaining weak ties on social network sites, or as active participants to knowledge sharing sites. These signals, when aggregated and summarized, could be used to define individual profiles of potential candidates: job seekers, even if lacking a formal degree or changing their career path, could be qualitatively evaluated by potential employers through their online contributions. At the same time, developers are aware of the Web’s public nature and the possible uses of published information when they determine what to share with the world. Some might even try to manipulate public signals of technical qualifications, soft skills, and reputation in their favor. Assessing candidates on the Web for technical positions presents challenges to recruiters and traditional selection procedures; the most serious being the interpretation of the provided signals. Through an in-depth discussion, we propose guidelines for software engineers and recruiters to help them interpret the value and trouble with the signals and metrics they use to assess a candidate’s characteristics and skills

Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.

Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design