Evaluation of the Victorian Community Crime Prevention Program: final report

This evaluation finds that the Community Crime Prevention Program is a highly valued contribution to the Victorian community crime prevention and community safety field. Abstract The Community Crime Prevention Program (CCPP), established by the Victorian Government, aims to enhance communities’ capacity to deliver local solutions to crime. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives to reduce the impact of criminal behaviour on Victorians. The Community Crime Prevention Unit (CCPU) is a business unit within the Department of Justice (DOJ) to administer the CCPP. The mainstay of the CCPP is a competitive grants program available to a wide variety of community organisations and local government authorities. Bodies that comply with the qualifying criteria are able to apply for funding in the allocated funding rounds. DOJ commissioned the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) to conduct an evaluation of the Victorian CCPP. In order to assess the strategic appropriateness and efficacy of the CCPP the AIC, in consultation with the CCPU and the Regional Directors forum that operates across the DOJ, developed a program logic model and evaluation framework. This informed the development of a comprehensive methodology combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. This included: consultation with key stakeholders; online survey of local government and community organisations; review of CCPP-sponsored interventions; and analysis of administrative data and program documentation relating to the operation of the CCPP. The project was undertaken between February and September 2014

An evaluation of a nurse led unit: an action research study

This study is an exemplar of working in a participatory way with members of the public and health and social care practitioners as co-researchers. A Nurse Consultant Older People working in a nurse-led bed, intermediate care facility in a community hospital acted as joint project lead with an academic researcher. From the outset, members of the public were part of a team of 16 individuals who agreed an evaluation focus and were involved in all stages of the research process from design through to dissemination. An extensive evaluation reflecting all these stakeholders’ preferences was undertaken. Methods included research and audit including: patient and carer satisfaction questionnaire surveys, individual interviews with patients, carers and staff, staff surveys, graffiti board, suggestion box, first impressions questionnaire, patient tracking and a bed census. A key aim of the study has been capacity building of the research team members which has also been evaluated. In terms of impact, the co-researchers have developed research skills and knowledge, grown in confidence, developed in ways that have impacted elsewhere in their lives, developed posters, presented at conferences and gained a better understanding of the NHS. The evaluation itself has provided useful information on the processes and outcomes of intermediate care on the ward which was used to further improve the service

Business Model Development for a Mobile Context-aware Service

Mobile information services, preceded on tablet computers, smartphones or other mobile devices, are a significant source of information for people nowadays. By including context data, a new category of information services has been established. On the application side, a range of innovative services, providing the user with an added-value, could be observed in the previous years, boosted by the wide-spread adoption of smartphones in developed countries. For the application provider, the question how to configure the business model is crucial: several factors such as the service configuration, the revenue model and the configuration of the value creation network, which all can be seen as decisive factors for success or failure of a service. In this paper we present a context-aware service named \u27Digital Graffiti\u27 and describe the process of the business model development. As an outcome of this process, a specific business model, based on feasibility and future prospect, was chosen and further described

Smarter CRM from a Customer Service Perspective: A Process Evaluation on the City of San José\u27s My San Jose Smartphone Application for City Services

This research paper provides background on the City of San José’s smart phone application history and reviews other similar municipal smart phone applications. It also analyzes current literature on implementations of non-emergency service communications and service requests (311). Primarily, this research paper investigates whether the functioning of the My San Jose smartphone application and website platforms are meeting the intended goal of improving the customer experience for city services. This paper analyzes My San Jose raw service request data to review performance. In addition, this paper analyzes qualitative information gathered from semi-structured interviews of City of San José employees to shed additional insight into the processes in place to fulfill these service requests from start to finish

Washington Park Main Street Plan

There is an immense variety of privately owned businesses. They will be stakeholders because their businesses are located there, but they will also be assets in themselves in drawing people to the area. There is basically everything anyone could possible want or need in this area. There are two gas stations, a Family Dollar, a liquor store, a few sit down restaurants, numerous places where one can get a quick bite to eat, a frame shop, a clothing store, a pawn shop, a store with fresh produce (which is hard to find in urban areas), a store that sells sports uniforms, a frame shop, a lawyerʼs office, an animal hospital, two Laundromats, a record shop, a health food store, two cell phone stores, an automotive shop, and a karate school with an afterschool program. With such variety, it will draw people to the area and then give them other reasons to keep coming back

Rock Art Pilot Project Main Report

A report on the results of a pilot project to investigate the current state of research, conservation, management and presentation of prehistoric rock art in England commissioned by English Heritage from Archaeology Group, School of Conservation Sciences, Bournemouth Unviersity and the Institute of Archaeology, University College Londo

Tackling property damage: a guide for local commerce groups, councils and police

Introduction: Property damage is the intentional ‘destruction or defacement of public, commercial and private property’. This covers a range of different acts, including vandalism (eg smashing windows, knocking over letterboxes) and graffiti. Graffiti is the act of marking property with writing, symbols or graphics and is illegal when committed without the property owner’s consent. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Crime Victimisation Survey 2011–2012, malicious property damage was more common than any other property offence, with 7.5 percent of respondents reporting having been a victim in the previous 12 months. The cost of property damage to private property owners, local and state governments and businesses are significant, with an estimated cost of $1,522 per incident (in 2012 dollars) and a total cost to the Australian community of nearly$2 billion each year. Using the handbook This handbook forms part of a series of guides developed by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) to support local commerce groups (ie representative groups for business owners and operators), local government and the police to implement evidence-based crime prevention strategies. This handbook has been developed to help guide project managers through the stages of planning, implementing and evaluating a crime prevention project to reduce property damage offences in their local community, particularly in and around commercial precincts. The handbook provides an overview of the three key stages that are involved in delivering a project to reduce property damage: Stage 1: Planning; Stage 2: Implementation; and Stage 3: Review. These steps do not necessarily need to be undertaken in order. Some steps may be undertaken concurrently or it may be necessary to revisit earlier steps. However, it is vital that some steps, such as consulting stakeholders and planning for evaluation, be undertaken early on in the project. Property damage is a very broad offence category. The choice of a particular intervention or interventions will depend largely on the nature of the local problem. Similarly, the successful implementation of a prevention strategy will often be heavily influenced by the characteristics of the local community. This needs to be considered throughout the life of a project

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

What is Specific about Art/Cultural Projects?

The present issue focuses on the contribution made by art/cultural initiatives to the development of multiple identity in some of the European cities having in mind the subjectivity of the artists and plurality of the surrounding cultures. The art/cultural projects (AES- Russia, Europe Art Train – Holland, Life Station – Austria and some others) with intercultural dimension have a special character to offer because: they are dealing with meaning, and enable dialogue between people in different social groups. The examples will be taken from different European countries, which aim to reinterpret the reality of life, to show, answer, and question its contradictions. The attention will be focused on their political, educational and aesthetic contribution to the community construction having in mind their desire for new intercultural policy and practices. Every artist crosses borders daily but those who choose to cross cultural borders (language, expression, music, tradition) enter into a fertile, but dangerous field. Artists do not aim specifically to produce multicultural work but since they are living in specific time, and since art is rooted in real life, the realities of everyday life are transposed into their work. This paper is fundamentally interested in the role that art projects can play in a modern society and promotes the initiative that links an artistic dimension to a form of interactive social urban situation. All projects are representing ‘laboratories’ that use public spaces. It is more than obvious that the social and the economic fields are not separated from the cultural one beside the tendency that is putting them in opposition as artists and the world rather than artists in the world. In the last two decades, the world of the arts has economised rapidly. Increasingly, artists have turned the economy into a subject of their own work. Art/cultural projects engage people’s creativity, and so lead to problem-solving. They encourage questioning, and the imagination of possible future actions. They offer self-expression, which is an essential characteristic of the active citizen. Some experiences from the art/cultural field are shifting attention towards the people themselves: their imagination, motivation, demands, fantasies and only then the city is becoming a cultural product, a community construction.Intercultural actions, Policy agenda, Art/cultural projects, Networking aspects