Energy Counselling and Modern IT. Drawing on Web 2.0 for a Greener World

The aim of this article is to explore how modern IT solutions for collaborative knowledge evolution could lead to more effective energy counselling and increased energy knowledge among the public. Comparative studies have been performed where the focus has been on the prerequisites for effective use of web 2.0 type collaboration and wikis. The research is primarily aimed at actors within the energy sector, although similar developments also take place in other sectors. Targeted investments employing collaborative IT to involve the public in energy counselling could lead to lower energy consumption and an increased consciousness of environmental issues in the society. A conclusion is that web 2.0-like initiatives could play a valuable role in the knowledge development and exchange between energy counsellors, and further the knowledge exchange between the counsellors, the regional energy agencies and the public. They could also help channel an energy interest among the public into a collaborative knowledge production, and contribute to a good quality factual basis for the conceptions that develop in society. This would strengthen both the energy counselling and the energy counsellor corps.communities, sustainability, sector transcendence, energy counselling, web 2.0.

Linked open government data: lessons from Data.gov.uk

The movement to publish government data is an opportunity to populate the linked data Web with data of good provenance. The benefits range from transparency to public service improvement, citizen engagement to the creation of social and economic value. There are many challenges to be met before the vision is implemented, and this paper describes the efforts of the EnAKTing project to extract value from data.gov.uk, through the stages of locating data sources, integrating data into the linked data Web, and browsing and querying it

Discovering public preferences for school location in Surabaya

Public schools in Surabaya became the major choice for Surabaya citizen in schooling their children. Their zero tuition fee, good quality, and good facilities are the strong attraction. However, the school's location is not well spread in whole city location, especially the secondary level and high level schools. Some analysis to improve this spread has been conducted and good new school location has been noted. Nevertheless, whether this new school location is accepted by the public, moreover, the good school spread is important or not for the public have not been discovered. This research uses Public Participatory GIS concept to discover public preferences in choosing school location. Using web base application at http://participatorygis.net, an online survey has been run about a year. By analyzing the collected data with some programming and spatial analysis tools, it can be seen the preferences level of a whole area in the city. This preferences level area will explain the public acceptance of current condition or the proposed new school location

Using Wikis to Create Online Communities

A wiki allows anyone the ability to take part in the creation and editing of web content. With its simplified text-formatting rules that anyone can easily learn, it truly puts experienced web designers and web novices on equal footing. In public libraries, where the technological skills of employees can range from high to non-existent, wikis can allow everyone the ability to develop the website. The resulting website would reflect the imagination and good ideas of the entire organization, not just a select few with the requisite "tech-savvy." The possibilities for what libraries can do with wikis are endless. At their least, they are spaces for quick and easy collaborative work. At their best, they can become true community resources that can position the library as an online hub of their local community

Design and Implementation of Network Public Opinion Analysis System

Network public opinion analysis is an important way of information analysis processing. This paper based on the research of the related technologies, designs and realizes a new network public opinion analysis system. System mainly includes network data fetching part, fetching the data processing part, analyzes the processed data part and display part of the public opinion analysis results. In the document extraction part, used the web crawler technology, Larbin web crawler to realize the collection of web content; In public opinion information analysis part, the implementation of the new topic adopts an improved Single - Pass clustering algorithm. This algorithm is using of multi-center, using the title and body of the vector to compared two-way ,that is better reflect the dynamics of public opinion topics. Finally, in the network environment of a university, we have the tests repeatedly. The results show that the new public opinion analysis system running is stable and has good efficiency. The thesis has certain value for the development of other information analysis systems in the Internet

Measuring transparency in public spending: Case of Czech Public e-Procurement Information System

The objective of this paper is to analyze the potential of e-Government tools to enable the general public to oversee spending of public institutions. The paper illustrates the “watchdog” potential of reducing corruption by means of providing information to the public on the example of the Czech Public e-Procurement Information System (further called System). The System is an Internet portal, where public authorities announce their intention to purchase goods and services. Such announcements are monitored by private entities that can compete for the respective public contract. For our paper we used a web robot to collect data about public procurements from the System and utilized them for construction of an original Transparency Index, which rates institutions that award public contracts (so called contracting authorities). The composite Index is constructed as a weighted sum of ten various transparency indicators, computed separately for each contracting authority. This Index could serve as an efficient benchmark for continuous control and comparison of public institutions in the area of public procurement and demonstrates how an e-Government tool can contribute to greater openness and accountability of these public institutions and to enhancement of the civic engagement in the control of governmental activities. The results of our research suggest that although the System is good step forward, its current structure does not enable the public to effectively exercise public control over procurements spending of contracting authorities, because of serious difficulties related to viewing (and extraction) of aggregate data. On the other hand, on example of our Transparency Index, we demonstrate that if the System allowed for easier access to data on public procurements, it would serve as an efficient tool of public control and facilitate open government initiatives.public procurement, Transparency Index, efficient public control, open government, corruption

Analisis Struktur Navigasi Antaramuka Pengguna Pada Penyebaran Informasi Publik Berbasis Web (Studi Kasus Website Departemen Negara RI)

According to the user\u27s perspective, User interface is visible and important part of the computer system; that require the highest priority in the design of computer systems (Jaspers, 2006). There are many aspects to web design. According to Vandelay (2007), successful website is made by content quality, simple and interactive design, easy to navigate, unique, fresh, and optimize. Design context will be the great importance related to the dissemination of public information. According to Act No. 14/2008 on the Openness of Public Information that Each of Public Information is open and can be accessed by any user of Public Information and Each of Public Information should be obtained by each Public Information\u27s applicant quickly and on time, low cost and with less effort. Information dissemination efforts through the web are often hampered by the difficulty of navigation in a website. This study examined the structure of navigation in the website\u27s user interface of any departments within the Republic of Indonesia to find out how difficult public information can be accessed through the website. The method is carried out in this study is the observation, literature study and analysis of 20 website\u27s user interface in the environment department of the Republic of Indonesia. The results obtained from this study is that the user can easily access public information, because all the website\u27s homepage displays the latest news or information and almost all websites have a search section to find out necessary information in the website. And the user will not be confused in knowing their positions, because in most cases the department has implemented a web site using a signpost and window title page, logo web pages, tabs and indicator selection. In addition, users can learn about the flow to get public information with the use of wayfinding, that is good signage, environmental clues and maps

This Is a Local Domain: On Amassing Country-Code Top-Level Domains from Public Data

Domain lists are a key ingredient for representative censuses of the Web. Unfortunately, such censuses typically lack a view on domains under country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs). This introduces unwanted bias: many countries have a rich local Web that remains hidden if their ccTLDs are not considered. The reason ccTLDs are rarely considered is that gaining access -- if possible at all -- is often laborious. To tackle this, we ask: what can we learn about ccTLDs from public sources? We extract domain names under ccTLDs from 6 years of public data from Certificate Transparency logs and Common Crawl. We compare this against ground truth for 19 ccTLDs for which we have the full DNS zone. We find that public data covers 43%-80% of these ccTLDs, and that coverage grows over time. By also comparing port scan data we then show that these public sources reveal a significant part of the Web presence under a ccTLD. We conclude that in the absence of full access to ccTLDs, domain names learned from public sources can be a good proxy when performing Web censuses.Comment: 6 pages double-column, 4 figures; submitted to ACM SIGCOMM CC

Trust, communication and equlibrium behaviour in public goods

This paper reports a novel cross-cultural public goods game experiment played in real time through Internet. Web-based software was used to compare the contributions to public good of different groups of participants: mixed, consisting of both Italians (students in law and economics) and Russians (students in economics), as well as all-Italian and all-Russian groups. This setup allows for testing for a number of effects, including participants’ awareness of the group composition in terms of nationality and gender of group members; possibility of coordination of one’s strategy during a cheap talk session organized before some of the games was used as an additional control. Our results show that the degree of cooperation is rather high, but does not vary significantly with nationalities of the group members, while communication tends to enhance contributions to public goods. A notable difference between the subjects representing the two nations is an overly strong and increasing cooperativeness of the Russian female participants in contrast to that of the Russian men, as well as the Italians.PUBLIC GOODS GAME, CROSS-CULTURAL EXPERIMENT, COOPERATION

Emergent digital services in public libraries : a domain study

Purpose: This paper explores the emergence of digital services in the public library domain via an extensive study of the websites of all Scottish public library services Design/methodology/approach: In a 4 month period all 32 of Scotland’s public library authority websites were visited by a researcher. The goal of the researcher was to record the options available from the library homepages in the following way: •Role of library in providing page content: content provider or access provider? •Was the page providing a digital service? •What was the audience for the page? Adult, child, or not specified? •Description of page content •Any noted usability issues Each site was only visited to three levels below that of the initial homepage. Findings: The study found a good standard of innovation in digital services around LMS functions, offering users the ability to keep in control of their borrowing and reserving. In addition there was a consistent set of electronic reference resources subscribed to by multiple libraries, offering high quality information both within the library and for library members from their home or workplace. Problems were found with regards to guidance on the usage of these resources, as well as confusion and inconsistency in terminology usage across different library services. Research limitations/implications: The paper examines only Scottish public library sites, thus can only claim to be representative of that country. It also can only represent the sites at the time they were examined. Practical implications: The paper should be of interest to public and other librarians interested in patterns across web sites in their sector. Originality/value: This is the first national study of Scottish public library websites and its findings should be of value as a result