Empowerment and Participation: How could the wide range of social effects of participatory approaches be better elicited and compared?

Research and support approaches to development that involve the stakeholders are the subject of criticism, due to their overly superficial approach to social dynamics, and the difficulties they encounter when organizing sustainable change beyond a purely local scale. Their evaluators as well as the majority of practitioners reckon that the quality of their social outcomes depends mainly on the social and political context as well as on the human qualities of the moderators and local leaders. It then becomes difficult to justify the investment in an approach whose very practitioners recognize that the greater part of the conditions for its success lie in social factors over which they have little control. That is why it is important to develop a common framework for participatory approaches, taking into account their different understandings of stakeholders, objectives, forms and limits. This will lead to a more rigorous and pragmatic way to propose to development policies as well as research action proponents some clear and practical positioning of participation, face to the critical questionings. This paper propose thus a methodological avenue, tested with in several countries, to better elicit and manage the social constraints and objectives of a people centered approach

Progetto di un propulsore ad effetto Hall sperimentale a bassa potenza a parametri variabili

Il presente lavoro di tesi ha lo scopo di focalizzare l’attenzione sulle fasi di disegno, progettazione ed analisi mediante simulazioni agli elementi finiti, del comportamento di un propulsore ad effetto Hall sottoposto a variazioni di intensità della componente radiale del campo magnetico indotto nel traferro e della geometria del canale di accelerazione. Nella prima parte della tesi sono riportate le leggi fondamentali che stanno alla base del funzionamento dei motori ad effetto Hall. Partendo poi da una geometria preliminare, ottimizzandone le simulazioni magnetiche, si cercherà di capire quali possano essere le modifiche geometriche e tecnologiche da apportare alla geometria che ne consentano il raggiungimento di una configurazione magnetica ottimale. Ogni modello realizzato sarà comunque sottoposto ad analisi termica monitorando di volta in volta i valori massimi di temperatura raggiunti dai singoli componenti

A ten-years-after impact analysis of a Companion Modelling approach. Final evaluation report: The 'Plan d'Occupation et d'Affectation des Sols (POAS)' operation in the rural community of Ross Bethio in Senegal

The approach: 1. Companion Modeling (ComMod) is a participatory approach used over the 15 years all over the world in order to help a diversity of stakeholders progress to reach an agreement about how to collectively deal with a given issue (multiple uses of natural resources, conflict resolution, value chain organization, land uses planning, policy participatory design, participatory monitoring and evaluation...). The approach achieves lasting impacts for empowerment at both local and national levels thanks to a twofold specificity: methodological and strategic. 2. The methodology focuses on a specific capacity building objective: to let the targeted groups learn by doing right from the first step, through an autonomous and collective practice of designing solutions to a common issue, then assessing and improving these solutions. The role of the support team is limited to monitoring only. The aim is to establish a dynamic autonomous learning-by-doing process which will continue after the light external intervention and make incremental empowerment impacts from local to national levels. 3. The approach also strongly focuses on defining an initial institutional strategy to impact the whole institutional context, from local to national levels. The strategy is defined around the identification of the needed first and smallest change of the local context for a first but lasting impact on empowerment, and, from there, the prior relationships and capacity building that need to be established to set in motion the essential first socio institutional step previously identified. 4. As a result, ComMod approach consists in a light support of (i) the prior design of an empowerment strategy, and (ii) three 2 days participatory workshops (for about 25 people, from the local aimed group) dispatched on 2 years. 5. The empowerment strategy is collectively designed by a local strategic alliance rallied at the beginning of the project. Then participatory workshops used specific role playing games in which participants themselves design the game, and then test their own ideas on how to collectively deal with the issue. These simulation games enable participants to explore future scenarios, by 'playing' their ideas and assessing the consequences in the game/model. As the roles of the different players preserve the diversity of stakeholders, potential impacts are assessed for each stakeholder's group, in peculiar distinguishing disadvantaged groups. 6. Lasting empowerment impacts on local autonomy are expected after the intervention, and both at local and national levels, thanks to the autonomous learning-by-doing process: (i) local autonomous improvement of the initial participatory decisions and (ii) progressive autonomous advocacy to embed local issues into national policies. 7. The approach is mastered by an increasing international community of practice (www.commod.org), which provides reference people, guidelines, training materials and trainings. The evaluation: 8. Between April and July 2012, IFAD has supported the evaluation of the oldest ComMod experiment ("Opération Poas" 1999-2000, Senegal River Valley, Senegal). The objective of this past intervention was to empower rural district councils so that they would be able to autonomously (i) design then manage a local land uses planning, (ii) oppose higher powers (specially centralized State agencies) to defend local interests and points of view; (iii) embed their local needs in national policy frameworks. The chosen site for the experiment was the largest and most complex rural district of Senegal: the Ross Bethio Communauté Rurale, that covers the whole Delta of Senegal River. 9. Evaluation showed sustainable local impacts, whether in the short term (e.g. after three 2-days-workshops, the district council has designed and implemented its own planning to deal with the key issues it has chosen; this also represented a step for the district council to learn about more inclusiveness in its decision-making), or in the medium term (e.g. after the end of the support, the district council found alone the means to develop infrastructure, to organize internally to manage the issue, and even to efficiently defend local needs from top-down programs and behaviors), or in the long term (e.g. 12 years after, some local councils still use their 'Poas' plan to oppose to land grabbing). 10. Evaluation also showed national impacts, whether in the short term (e.g. 2 years after the end of the support, a council of ministers council stipulated that the method should taken up in the whole country), or in the medium term (e.g. each regional plan takes into account the local land uses needs identified during the Poas experiment), and in the long term (e.g. 12 years after, the methodology designed by the local council during the ComMod experiment is acknowledged throughout country, but also in some bordering countries, to set district land uses planning). 11. These different impacts have been reached through an autonomous progressive diffusion, from the initial (1998-2000) well-thought capacity- and relationships--building and institutional strategic facilitation

Modelling outputs from a stakeholders' self-modeling to catch environmental uncertainty: A case study in the Sahel

A participatory modeling approach called "self-design" has been experimented in Senegal with the aim of letting farmers design their own model of the local natural resources management issues. The success of the experiment and its outputs led to a new participatory modeling approach based on the central principle of letting stakeholders design and use their own conceptual model of environmental management. This unusual endogenous design resulted in a qualitative but nevertheless worthy model of the Sahelian environmental uncertainty, which is currently enriching the debate about the value of local worldviews for environmental modeling

Melody: A Platform for Linked Open Data Visualisation and Curated Storytelling

Data visualisation and storytelling techniques help experts highlight relations between data and share complex information with a broad audience. However, existing solutions targeted to Linked Open Data visualisation have several restrictions and lack the narrative element. In this article we present MELODY, a web interface for authoring data stories based on Linked Open Data. MELODY has been designed using a novel methodology that harmonises existing Ontology Design and User Experience methodologies (eXtreme Design and Design Thinking), and provides reusable User Interface components to create and publish web-ready article-alike documents based on data retrievable from any SPARQL endpoint. We evaluate the software by comparing it with existing solutions, and we show its potential impact in projects where data dissemination is crucial

Knowledge Representation of digital Hermeneutics of archival and literary Sources

Scholarly analysis of archival, library, and literary sources results in a variety of digital artefacts meant to foster knowledge discovery and new research enquiries. Guidelines and standards to formally represent disciplinary information are available (e.g. XML schemas, ontologies, vocabularies). However, digital artefacts rarely address reusable structured information on the hermeneutical approach adopted by scholars when validating hypotheses. As a consequence, reproducibility and assessment of research results is hampered, and comparing online contradictory information is still a hard task. In this work we show how to leverage Semantic Web technologies in a high-level, portable data model for representing hermeneutical aspects related to cross-disciplinary analysis of archival and literary sources. We showcase three representative scenarios in the Cultural Heritage domain where the model is applied, and we describe benefits and limits of our solution

A Programming Interface for Creating Data According to the SPAR Ontologies and the OpenCitations Data Model

The OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) is a data model for bibliographic metadata and citations based on the SPAR Ontologies and developed by OpenCitations to expose all the data of its collections as sets of RDF statements compliant with an ontology named OpenCitations Ontology. In this paper, we introduce oc_ocdm, i.e. a Python library developed for creating OCDM-compliant RDF data even if the programmer has no expertise in Semantic Web technologies. After an introduction of the library and its main characteristics, we show a number of projects within the OpenCitations infrastructure that adopt it as their building block unit

From ontology design to user-centred interfaces for music heritage

In this article we investigate the bridge between ontology design and UI/UX design methodologies to assist designers in prototyping web applications for information seeking purposes. We briefly review the state of the art in ontology design and UI/UX methodologies, then we illustrate our approach applied to a case study in the music heritage domain.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, part of "XII Convegno Annuale AIUCD 2023 Proceedings

Characterizing the Landscape of Musical Data on the Web: State of the Art and Challenges

Musical data can be analysed, combined, transformed and exploited for diverse purposes. However, despite the proliferation of digital libraries and repositories for music, infrastructures and tools, such uses of musical data remain scarce. As an initial step to help fill this gap, we present a survey of the landscape of musical data on the Web, available as a Linked Open Dataset: the musoW dataset of catalogued musical resources. We present the dataset and the methodology and criteria for its creation and assessment. We map the identified dimensions and parameters to existing Linked Data vocabularies, present insights gained from SPARQL queries, and identify significant relations between resource features. We present a thematic analysis of the original research questions associated with surveyed resources and identify the extent to which the collected resources are Linked Data-ready