Second Meeting of the Committee on Governance and Popular Participation

African civil society organizations (CSOs) form a sector that has become increasingly important over the past few decades in terms of its participation in the development and governance processes as well in global policy processes. This report highlights the impact and effectiveness of the participation of CSOs and NGOs in promoting development and governance in Africa

Behavioural Dimensions for Discovering Knowledge Actor Roles Utilising Enterprise Social Network Metrics

The identification of distinct user roles is an important theme in social media research. However, for Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), the use of social media within organisations, research identifying such roles is still lacking. Yet, understanding user roles, in particular regarding their knowledge con-tributions and communication behaviour, might usefully support companies in managing critical knowledge resources. Against this backdrop, in this research-in-progress paper we derive 16 metrics characterising the participation behaviour, message content and structural position of ESN users of an Australian professional services firm. Based on a factor analysis, we identify four distinct dimensions of ESN user behaviour: Contribution & networking, information provision, contact dispersion and invisible usage. With this research we contribute to the literature by transferring concepts and meth-ods of organisation science and social media research to an ESN context. Further, our approach forms the basis for the identification of different types of knowledge actors, which might ultimately help to improve organisational knowledge transparency

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Assessment of Networking of Higher Education Institution

Networking phenomenon of a Higher Education Institution (HEI) is investigates in this dissertation, thus addressing the problem of networking assessment evolving from the need to use the networking for the strategic management of the HEI in a more extensive way. Also the possibilities of managing the networking of higher education more effectively are investigated in order to support growing networking based activities of internationalisation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity indicating the relevance of the thesis. At a scientific level, a lack of different tools for assessing and monitoring the networking and portfolio of the HEI can be noticed, which may assist in understanding the surrounding network on more systematic grounds. The object of the dissertation is the networking (entering and participation in the network and interaction with other institutions) of the Higher Education Institution. The core of the dissertation is the development and empirical testing of a Networking Assessment Model that would increase the strategic use of networking in order to improve the competitiveness of HEIs. The dissertation consists of the introduction, three chapters, general conclusions and 9 annexes. Chapter 1 presents networking phenomena in contemporary management and further proceeds with a review of networking in public sector management which leads to the analysis of network assessment methods and to the formulation of the scientific problem of the thesis. Chapter 2 turns the structure and overview of the Network Assessment Model (NAM) into a more detailed explanation of three stages of the model: Stage 1 adapts multi-criteria methods for the assessment of networking, Stage 2 presents assessment applying network pictures and Stage 3 explains how to transform the results of network assessment into strategic insights. Chapter 3 assesses the networking of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in order to test the NAM and derives recommendations for strategies on developing more effective networking in the fields of research and studies. 6 publications focusing on the subject discussed in the dissertation have been issued: 4 of those have been included in internationally recognized databases, 1 represents conference material and 1 is a study

Social Innovations in Creative Communities for Sustainable Consumption: is it promising?

In the current discourse on sustainable consumption, there have been major interventions by the businesses and governments, focusing on changing consumer behavior through greening products and services. However, the problem of consumption is not limited to greening products and environmental impacts, but it is also a social issue. Together with the increasing consumption around the world and materialistic aspirations, a decline in well being and happiness can also be observed, particularly in industrialized countries. Recently, the sustainable consumption process has started to draw attention to individual value shifts reflected on peoples consumption patterns and social behavior. To examine and explain phenomenon, examples from creative communities are being analysed. According to some experts on sustainable production and consumption, these creative communities are showing promising outcomes through increasing well being and developing sustainable lifestyles. Still, they have been unable to disseminate their practices to the mainstream markets. This indicates a need for developing strategies to explore the creative communities in terms their values, principles, social innovation strategies, practices and their perspectives of sustainability. Unless these are well understood and an exchange platform is established between relevant actors including citizens, it is unlikely that creative community practices (i.e. sustainable lifestyle cases) will be incorporated the society as a whole. This research addresses the challenges and opportunities facing creative communities, their behaviours and social innovation solutions using both theoretical and empirical studies. The results are based on five field case study communities from the US, Scotland, Sweden and Italy, each with different types of social innovations. The main findings on individual value orientation and action incurring benefits demonstrate the potential of the communities or their practices to be adapted by wider society. Moreover, the nature of their practices, which highly depend on ethical responsibility, transfer of knowledge and networking relations, have shown the potential of linking between creative communitycitizens, external actors-community and between individuals. This can be established through creating relational spaces, which can take varied forms to stimulate social innovation in the agenda of sustainable consumption

Influence of External Factors on the Performance through the Network of Small and Medium Enterprises

The background of this research is based on the performance of small and medium enterprises which states that the network is part of a very important thing to improve and enhance the performance, but the network is done SMEs is influenced by many factors, one of which factors external to the organization. This study examined theoretically based on previous literature and a variety of empirical evidence. The hypothesis there is a significant positive effect of external factors on the performance over the network. Networking is an entrepreneurial tool that is very important because it contributes to the formation, development and growth of small companies. Network on small companies shows that the network will help companies obtain information and advice. Results of this study showed that there were significant positive influence of external factors on the performance over the network. Keywords: External Factors, Performance and Networkin

Strategists in an uncertain world

Referring to the conceptual framework for strategy-as-practice (Whittington 2006, Jarzabkowski et al. 2007), this paper aims at investigating the practioners-practices couple, by analysing the main and recurrent individual characteristics of practitioners and the way they interact with their troubled environment and the strategy formation process of the organization (formalization, intuition, market or organization-focused, communication mode, ...). Hence, we focus on strategists and their strategizing practices.strategizing; strategists