Bridging community associations in post-con£ict Burundi: the di⁄cultmerging of social capital endowments and new ‘institutional settings’

Associations have been labelled the main 'building blocks' for creating social capital. It has been argued that community associations need to transform 'bonding' into 'bridging' ties to 'reach out' while also creating 'linking' ties to 'scale up'. External development actions follow a reverse logic in promoting these associations: they assume that linking ties with the external intervener will reinforce prior social capital endowments. This article highlights the inherent difficulties of such a 'social engineering' approach in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, describing three development interventions in the north of Burundi. It defines the process of 'institutional syncretism' - merging local with global institutional settings - as a key element to social capital building. The findings illustrate how the three interventions failed to reach this objective, and question 'bridging' associations as 'universal blueprints' for restoring social cohesion within the liberal peace model for post-conflict reconstruction

The design of a composite folding bike to improve the user experience of commuters

Over the last years, the popularity of folding bikes has been increasing as a result of the rise of multi-modal transport. They are used by commuters as a complement to public transport. Despite the increasing popularity, the current market offer of folding bikes still represents quite some restrictions and downsides which decrease their usability. This paper shows a user-centred process of designing and prototyping a composite folding bike with the aim of improving the user experience of folding bike using commuters. By improving the usability and ease of use of folding bikes, their full potential can be unlocked. The design process led to a disruptive folding bike design with front and rear single-sided offset wheel mounting. The concept excels in its intuitive and quick folding mechanism, superior riding performance and comfort, adjustability and overall ease of use. In addition to the design process and prototyping of the folding bike, this extended abstract elaborates on the performed user tests and its results. These tests range from the impact of offset wheels to the intuitiveness of the folding mechanism and were performed in order to prove different aspects of the design. This research shows how rethinking and redesigning a bike concept (product) from scratch, using a user-centred design process and taking into account the three aspects — business, technology and people — can lead to a disruptive design that improves usability and the overall user experience of the stakeholders

De Civiele Maatschappij: een 'nieuwe' partner in een 'oud' systeem

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing consensus in the international development community about the role of civil society as a relevant partner in economic development and political change all over the world. This article places this debate in the context of state-society relations in Sub-Sahara-Africa. As will become clear, the international consensus is based on one specific and highly normative interpretation of this relation between state and civil society. This consensus defines civil society as an independent actor vis-à-vis the state, capable of championing democratic and governance reforms. Our own argument starts from the assumption that this interpretation ignores the complex interrelatedness of state and civil society in African societies. As such, we propose a theoretical framework that recognizes a plurality of different state-society relations and also pays attention to informal as well as formal relations between state and civil society. By doing so, we question the international consensus about the role civil society can play in Sub-Sahara-Africa. Key Words: Civil Society, State-Society Relations, Sub-Sahara-Afric

OTO : A DIY platform for mobile social robots in education

This paper describes the design of OTO, a do-it-yourself expansion kit for OPSORO (Open Platform for Social Robots), that enables and facilitates the creation of mobile social robots. The expansion kit consists of modular, adaptable building blocks combined with a software toolkit, and is aimed at applications within the maker community, STEM education, and the market for creative inventor kits. Keeping reproducibility and adaptability in mind, the expansion kit can be produced entirely using digital manufacturing technology and low-cost, off-the-shelf components. Using the building blocks offered by this system, users can easily design, build and customize mobile social robots. The software is designed to address a wide range of users by offering different programming options depending on the user’s skill and experience. Inexperienced users are offered a graphical programming environment based on Blockly, whereas more advanced users can program their robot using Lua or Python. The OTO toolkit offers a fun and playful context in which a wide range of STEM-related skills are addressed

RSAT: regulatory sequence analysis tools

The regulatory sequence analysis tools (RSAT, http://rsat.ulb.ac.be/rsat/) is a software suite that integrates a wide collection of modular tools for the detection of cis-regulatory elements in genome sequences. The suite includes programs for sequence retrieval, pattern discovery, phylogenetic footprint detection, pattern matching, genome scanning and feature map drawing. Random controls can be performed with random gene selections or by generating random sequences according to a variety of background models (Bernoulli, Markov). Beyond the original word-based pattern-discovery tools (oligo-analysis and dyad-analysis), we recently added a battery of tools for matrix-based detection of cis-acting elements, with some original features (adaptive background models, Markov-chain estimation of P-values) that do not exist in other matrix-based scanning tools. The web server offers an intuitive interface, where each program can be accessed either separately or connected to the other tools. In addition, the tools are now available as web services, enabling their integration in programmatic workflows. Genomes are regularly updated from various genome repositories (NCBI and EnsEMBL) and 682 organisms are currently supported. Since 1998, the tools have been used by several hundreds of researchers from all over the world. Several predictions made with RSAT were validated experimentally and published

Land als ultiem vredesdividend?: over vredesopbouw en landconflicten in Burundi

In dit artikel focussen we op deze laatste fase van vredesopbouw. Het gaat in op de analyse en preventie van landconflicten in post-conflict Burundi. Vredesopbouw betekent in eerste instantie de preventie van nieuw geweld, en het creëren van een vredesdividend is een noodzakelijke voorwaarde hiervoor. Volgens Nelson Mandela, onderhandelaar tijdens de vredesonderhandelingen, moet de Burundese bevolking snel een duidelijk verschil ervaren tussen de destructiviteit van het conflict en de voordelen van de prille vrede (Brachet & Wolpe, 2005: 1). Zoals in dit artikel duidelijk zal worden, is land het ultieme vredesdividend voor elke Burundees. Het oplossen van de landproblematiek is dan ook een van de belangrijkste pijlers in het Burundese proces van vredesopbouw