A Microservice Infrastructure for Distributed Communities of Practice

Non-formal learning in Communities of Practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today’s knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically towards CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or even develop a software ecosystem to support their activities. In this paper, we describe a distributed, microservice-based Web infrastructure for non-formal learning in CoPs. It mitigates the need for central infrastructures, coordination or facilitation and takes into account the constant change of these communities. As a real use case, we implement an inquiry-based learning application on-top of our infrastructure. Our evaluation results indicate the usefulness of this learning application, which shows promise for future work in the domain of community-hosted, microservice-based Web infrastructures for learning outside of formal settings

The masked demos: Associational anonymity and democratic practice

The increased use of anonymous digital platforms raises substantive concerns about accountability in digital spaces. However, contemporary evaluations of anonymity focus too narrowly on its protective function: its ability to protect a diversity of speakers and ideas. Drawing on two examples of anonymous political engagements – Publius’s writing of the Federalist Papers and college students’ use of the social media platform Yik Yak – we develop an account of anonymity’s associational function: the processes by which people generate and negotiate collective identities, discussions, and actions in wider publics. As we argue, anonymity’s associational function can (1) generate conditions under which individuals develop collective interests and identities to foster collective action, and (2) enable novel interactions between these individuals and communities and the larger publics of which they are part. We conclude with a discussion of how attention to associational anonymity can contribute to a more nuanced account of democracy in practice

Towards a global participatory platform Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project’s own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed

Quando "la mente del terapeuta lascia cadere il paziente" : dal controllo pietrificante all'espressione del bisogno

Nella relazione con il paziente borderline spesso lo psicoterapeuta avverte una sensazione di "noia" mentre osserva il paziente che erge un muro di parole difensive che potrebbero apparire ricche di contenuti se non fosse proprio per quella sensazione che creano: la noia. Winnicott definisce le fantasie compulsive dei pazienti come una negazione della realt\ue0 psichica. E ne parla come di un fenomeno che assorbe energia emotiva senza contribuire "n\ue8 ai sogni n\ue8 alla realt\ue0". Frequentemente ci succede di chiederci perch\ue8 il linguaggio di questi pazienti sia cos\uec dettagliato, minuzioso, descrittivo di sinestesie inesistenti nella realt\ue0 relazionale e l'atteggiamento di chiusura, difensivo, non di emozione per una scoperta o un ricordo che "tocca". Il paziente in realt\ue0, nel qui e ora, della relazione sembra allontanarsi. La sua narrazione ricorda infatti "uno spazio pietrificato dove non pu\uf2 accadere assolutamente nulla". Eppure questo stancare il terapeuta e creare una sensazione di noia, oltre a far rivivere le primitive insufficienti carenze infantili, esprime delle modalit\ue0 utili a tenere a bada le angoscie interiori durante i momenti regressivi. Alcuni pazienti affermano, in alcuni momenti della terapia, quando maggiore sembra il loro ritiro dalla relazione, seppure riscoperto da un ricchissimo flusso verbale di non riconoscersi pi\uf9 "senza angoscia" e "la paura che non vi sia angoscia \ue8 la paura di una regressione senza ritorno" che fa temere loro di perdere il controllo, di divenire folli. La trasformazione della paura della follia latente si trasforma in produzione verbale interminabile. Ma dalla regressione \ue8 possibile il ritorno se gradatamente i pazienti apprendono ad usare il terapeuta in modo trasformativo. E lo stesso terapeuta "non lascer\ue0 pi\uf9 cadere il paziente dalla sua mente" che equivale al fallimento nella capacit\ue0 di sostenere un figlio da parte di una madr