Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social-technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which Wikipedians rely on to help manage and govern the "anyone can edit" encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they want to fully participate. I illustrate how cultural and organizational expertise is enacted around algorithmic agents by discussing two autoethnographic vignettes, which relate my personal experience as a veteran in Wikipedia. I present thick descriptions of how governance and gatekeeping practices are articulated through and in alignment with these automated infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, Wikipedian veterans and administrators have made specific decisions to support administrative and editorial workflows with automation in particular ways and not others. I use these cases of Wikipedia's bot-supported bureaucracy to discuss several issues in the fields of critical algorithms studies, critical data studies, and fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning -- most principally arguing that scholarship and practice must go beyond trying to "open up the black box" of such systems and also examine sociocultural processes like newcomer socialization.Comment: 14 pages, typo fixed in v

Creation of an Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology Training Knowledge Management System

Our team developed a training knowledge management system (KMS) for the United States Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology using Microsoft’s SharePoint. Through research, on-site analysis, focus groups, and interviews, we investigated user needs and developed a taxonomic search structure and KMS shell site. The site centralizes training courses and permits supervisory and individual tracking, which were key needs identified by staff and supervisors. We also developed recommendations and support materials for end- users and developers

A Semantic Approach to Secure Collaborative Inter-Organizational eBusiness Processes (SSCIOBP)

The information supply chain (ISC) involves the exchange, organization, selection, and synthesis of relevant knowledge and information about production, purchase planning, demand forecasting, and inventory among collaborating business partners in a value chain. Information and knowledge sharing in an ISC occurs in a business process context. Seamless knowledge exchange within and across organizations involved in secure business processes is critically needed to secure and cultivate the information supply chain. Extant literature does not explicitly consider or systematically represent component knowledge, process knowledge and security knowledge for business processes within and across organizations. As a result, organizations engaged in collaborative inter-organizational processes continue to be plagued with issues such as semantic conflict issues, lack of integration of heterogeneous systems, and lack of security knowledge regarding authorized access to resources. Without appropriate security controls, manual interventions lead to unauthorized access to resources. These problems motivate our Semantic Approach to Secure Collaborative Inter-Organizational eBusiness Processes (SSCIOBP). We follow a design science paradigm to identify meta-requirements of SSCIOBP and develop the design artifact. SSCIOBP is evaluated using observational and descriptive evaluation methods following Hevner et al. (2004). We apply our approach to show how the Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) industry standard models can be enhanced using the proposed design artifact. We apply SSCIOBP to a case study to illustrate its applicability in mapping core business processes of organizations to solve semantic inter-operability issues and systematically incorporate component, process and security knowledge in the design of secure business processes across the information supply chain

Will e-Science Be Open Science?

This contribution examines various aspects of “openness” in research, and seeks to gauge the degree to which contemporary “e-science” practices are congruent with “open science.” Norms and practices of openness are vital for the work of modern scientific communities, but concerns about the growth of stronger technical and institutional restraints on access to research tools, data, and information recently have attracted notice—in part because of their implications for the effective utilization of advanced digital infrastructures and information technologies in research collaborations. Our discussion clarifies the conceptual differences between e-science and open science, and reports findings from a preliminary look at practices in U.K. e-science projects. Both parts serve to emphasize that it is unwarranted to presume that the development of e-science necessarily promotes global open science collaboration. Since there is evident need for further empirical research to establish where, when, and to the extent “openness” and "e-ness" in scientific and engineering research may be expected to advance hand-in-hand, we outline a framework within which such a program of studies might be undertaken.e-Science, Open Science, Engineering Reserach

Electronic information sharing in local government authorities: Factors influencing the decision-making process

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in International Journal of Information Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Local Government Authorities (LGAs) are mainly characterised as information-intensive organisations. To satisfy their information requirements, effective information sharing within and among LGAs is necessary. Nevertheless, the dilemma of Inter-Organisational Information Sharing (IOIS) has been regarded as an inevitable issue for the public sector. Despite a decade of active research and practice, the field lacks a comprehensive framework to examine the factors influencing Electronic Information Sharing (EIS) among LGAs. The research presented in this paper contributes towards resolving this problem by developing a conceptual framework of factors influencing EIS in Government-to-Government (G2G) collaboration. By presenting this model, we attempt to clarify that EIS in LGAs is affected by a combination of environmental, organisational, business process, and technological factors and that it should not be scrutinised merely from a technical perspective. To validate the conceptual rationale, multiple case study based research strategy was selected. From an analysis of the empirical data from two case organisations, this paper exemplifies the importance (i.e. prioritisation) of these factors in influencing EIS by utilising the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. The intent herein is to offer LGA decision-makers with a systematic decision-making process in realising the importance (i.e. from most important to least important) of EIS influential factors. This systematic process will also assist LGA decision-makers in better interpreting EIS and its underlying problems. The research reported herein should be of interest to both academics and practitioners who are involved in IOIS, in general, and collaborative e-Government, in particular

Technology argument frames : examining the impact of argumentation on the development of a health information exchange initiative

This dissertation applies the Technology Frames of Reference (TFR) theoretical lens to examine the implementation of a health information exchange (HIE) initiative in southeast USA. It extends the TFR lens by developing Toulminian argument maps to depict frame structure and employing the argument theories of Toulmin, Habermas and Perelman Olbrechts-Tyteca to help analyze the role that argumentation plays in the emergence and development of the technology frames that characterized this HIE endeavor. The argument maps developed in this dissertation helped to assess the level of argumentation within frames and to compare argumentation across frame domains. The argument maps were also used to structurally depict changes in frame salience over time and helped to facilitate the discovery of a prominent “perspective blindness” or “perspective indifference” which was the key finding of this dissertation. Previous TFR literature has focused on dysfunctions produced by conflict/alignment issues. This dissertation extends this research by highlighting the role that conflict avoidance or frame apathy may play in producing these dysfunctions. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric was recommended as a boundary spanning discursive framework that could help ameliorate the problems associated with both inter-frame conflict and frame indifference

Technology management has a significant impact on digital transformation in the banking sector

Technology management and a good relationship among employees are vital keys to assure any digital transformation process. We may therefore rightly ask “What are the main drivers influencing IT and non-IT employee relationships that may have an impact on digital transformation in the banking sector?“. Aiming to identify those drivers, we developed a questionnaire for an exploratory study into employees' perceptions of the IT or non-IT measures undertaken to improve any digital transformation project. We had a sample of 604 bank employees working in software development. Leximancer was used as a qualitative technique tool for content textual analyses. The findings highlighted seven key factors that have an impact on digital transformation, namely: department, lack of cooperation, communication, requests, experience, relationship, and business. Internal clients tend to have a negative perception of IT developers mainly due to a lack of understanding of business requests. This study contributes to scholarship with a conceptual model to explain the main concepts that may affect the relationship between IT and non-IT employees’ and departments teamwork in the digital transformation process, in the banking sector specifically. We also contribute by identifying the most important elements to achieve organizational success.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Exploring Health Information Exchange (HIE) Through Collaboration Framework: Normative Guidelines for IT Leadership of Healthcare Organizations

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) hold the promise to integrate patient data residing across disparate information systems in various hospitals to improve care coordination, patient engagement, and provisioning of real-time information to physicians. This research posits that collaboration is the key to HIE’s success. Drawing from the extant literature on collaboration, we discuss collaboration-related challenges that healthcare IT leaders are facing and provide normative guidelines that they can implement during the HIE initiation phase as well as the maintenance phas