Evaluating EuroMET ‐ a Web‐based resource for meteorologists

Euro MET has been created to address the education and training needs of professional meteorologists and students in tertiary education throughout Europe and beyond Two module libraries have been developed for the WWW which are available in English, French, Spanish and German. The modules have been evaluated during their development and after completion. All the project partners used them in courses and training programmes within their institutions. This paper describes the formative and sum‐mative evaluation strategies used and some of the results obtained The efficacy of the evaluation approach adopted with respect to the size of the project is also discusse

Formulating an open source business model requires community segmentation and targeted marketing

From a commercial open source company's point of view, open source is ideally the ultimate in “grass roots" marketing where people learn by word-of-mouth about the project and where they volunteer their time and effort, resulting in a vibrant community that benefits the company in many ways. This enables an open source company to enjoy major advantages that do not normally accrue to proprietary software companies e.g. they do not need to spend resources on traditional marketing activities and furthermore, having this community support can help ensure the longevity of the project and company. While this ideal may apply to a handful of open source projects, where they achieve a large critical mass of a community which lends itself to a natural form of monetization, for the vast majority of open source companies, it is not the case of “build it and they will come”. Instead, most open source companies need to understand who comprises their community so they can formulate a viable business model. In particular, they need to understand that communities are comprised of heterogeneous types of people, each of which have their own interests, motivation, needs and ability to be monetized. Open source companies need to identify the subgroups in their community, decide which ones to deliberately focus on, and choose the best way to leverage them. This is indispensable for determining how best to monetize the interest in their software, ideally without ruffling the community spirit that differentiates their software from proprietary offerings. And this is where “old fashioned” marketing can help. This means understanding your user base and what makes them tick, determining their needs, and formulating products and services that people are willing to pay for. The sooner an open source company understands that it needs to practice traditional marketing techniques such as segmentation and target marketing, the faster they will hit on the business model formula that enables their company to succeed. These techniques need to be adapted for the open source world, which requires the blending of traditional marketing techniques and community relations. The risk of treating one's community in an undifferentiated manner and applying a generic, formulaic business model is that a company will fail to generate significant revenue as well as alienate a community that could abandon them. As a community is perhaps the most distinctive asset of an open source company, losing its community is tantamount to death. If the community is not properly nurtured and leveraged, an open source company's potential will not be realized. This paper aims at describing, through case study research, a generic approach for how commercial open source companies can segment their community to aid in their formulation of a business model and marketing plans to reach their potential. It is for anyone who works in an open source company or project who is trying to determine a viable business model. The paper is structured in three parts: the first part outlines the research question and methodology. The second part proposes a way that an open source company can segment its community. The final part analyzes the Funambol experience, describing how the company segmented its community and created open source programs to nurture and leverage it.

Licensing and Business Models

License affects software companies’ business activities. While proprietary software vendors create custom licenses, open source companies have less flexibility. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines a list of 72 licenses as open source (“OSI approved”). For a project to follow open source licensing, it has to pick licenses from this set. Logically, we expect that an open source company defines its business model around the license that it selects. Thus, we can assume that business model decisions follow license choice. In our research we find that in some cases open source companies remove these license constraints for business reasons. We observed cases of open source companies moving from one OSI-approved license to another or companies innovating by adding additional terms. In all these cases, the decision of change is based on the license being a poor fit with their business goals. Not all open source companies are entitled to change the license because this option is available only to companies that own intellectual property. If they do not, they can try to reshape their business model, but that remains a suboptimal option. Whether cognizant of it or not, organizations are implicitly choosing a business model when they select a license. Therefore, it is very important to address licensing and business model decisions as one system instead of a disjointed two-step process. For this purpose we introduce (1) an evolutionary model where license selection and business model impact each other and (2) a taxonomy that addresses both licensing and business models. Our approach helps practitioners include revenue considerations in the licensing choice and researchers to more accurately study the antecedents and consequences of license choice.

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

Misconceptions in chemistry : a comparative study of Samoa and New Zealand high schools to identify their different origins and approaches to eliminate and correct them : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Education at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The report describes a comparative study of students' misconceptions. It does so by investigating year 13 students' conceptual understanding of the structure bonding and related properties of diamond and graphite. The aims of the case study are to elicit, identify, and compare the different origins and develop appropriate strategies to promote correct conceptual understanding of chemistry concepts. The study involved sixty students, and three chemistry teachers from two different schools; one from Palmerston North, New Zealand and the other from Apia, Samoa. Open-ended question strategy was used to elicit the students' misconceptions, followed by interview and classroom observations of a sample of students. Analyses of the responses to the open question, interviews, students' artifacts and classroom observations, revealed the origins of the students' misconceptions about the structure, bonding and related properties of diamond and graphite

Spartan Daily, March 21, 2006

Volume 126, Issue 31https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10231/thumbnail.jp

A User-Based Look at Visualization Tools for Environmental Data and Suggestions for Improvement - An Inventory among City Planners in Gothenburg

With a growing interest in environmental data and the need to consider various environmental factors earlier in the planning processes, it becomes more important to disseminate this type of information to different target groups in a comprehensible way. To support easier decision making, many cities and municipalities are increasingly using digital city models where it is possible to integrate different types of information based on simulation and visualization of future scenarios. Such tools have high potential, but the visual representation of data still needs to be developed. In this paper, we investigate how professionals within urban planning currently use visualization to communicate environmental data, and what their needs are regarding tools and visual representation. We discuss challenges for representing environmental data in urban development processes, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of these issues. We base our investigation on a literature study, an inventorying survey and a focus group discussion with professionals within urban planning. This study provides an end-user perspective among urban planners and valuable insights on tool usage and visualization. Results show that applications used for environmental visualization still can be improved regarding, e.g., user friendliness and information handling, which may increase their efficiency