372,990 research outputs found
Schools, communities and social capital: building blocks in the 'Big Society' (Research associate full report)
"This study looked at how effective schools engage with their communities. Its aim was to identify key
mechanisms that promoted community engagement. It also sought to determine the impact this had on the
amount and nature of social capital available to pupils, parents and the wider community. Effective schools
were found to generate significant amounts of social capital within their institutions as demonstrated by the
degree of trust, reciprocity, civic engagement and social cohesion. Pupil voice was a powerful mechanism in
developing a sense of control and self-efficacy. Recently created posts such as family workers, therapists and
social work placements extended much of this impact into the family.
Schools that went further to promote social capital in the neighbourhood were those with a more
aspirational vision that went beyond simply engaging the community to aid school improvement. They
viewed community empowerment as key to the success of their pupils and families within the wider social
context. They encouraged community leadership and decision-making, often through informal learning
approaches, and truly became ‘hubs of the community’, facilitating community development and promoting
community cohesion. The findings suggest that a more reciprocal view is needed of the relationship between
school and community and that schools could play a central role in creating the ‘Big Society’.
Trust Based Participant Driven Privacy Control in Participatory Sensing
Widespread use of sensors and multisensory personal devices generate a lot of
personal information. Sharing this information with others could help in
various ways. However, this information may be misused when shared with all.
Sharing of information between trusted parties overcomes this problem. This
paper describes a model to share information based on interactions and opinions
to build trust among peers. It also considers institutional and other controls,
which influence the behaviour of the peers. The trust and control build
confidence. The computed confidence bespeaks whether to reveal information or
not thereby increasing trusted cooperation among peers.Comment: 14 page
Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management
An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks,
further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across
different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the
social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present
Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social
information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized
fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface
implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined
access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated
application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time,
low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of
Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog
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