China's telecommunication policy-making in the context of trade and economic reforms.

On December 11, 2001, the People's Republic of China officially joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO). More than 15 years after it had announced the resumption of its status as a contracting party, the country that had since then become one of the largest telecommunication market in the world, would finally abide by a set of internationally defined norms and rules. In the course of the WTO accession, its telecommunication sector has undergone an extensive reform process, introducing competition and the foundation of a legislative framework. Yet, China's telecommunication commitments have been notably weaker than those negotiated in other service sectors. The restructuring of the telecommunications sector - which started along the lines of global liberalisation programmes - could have been buttressed by the accession to the WTO. It was however shaped and blocked by diverse interests emanating from the fragmented Chinese political structure and resulted in an environment fraught with substantive regulatory issues. This thesis seeks to answer two inter-related questions: why did the government fail to reform in-depth the telecommunication sector and what mediated the impact the WTO accession process had on the sector's reform. It argues that the Chinese government's failure to create a regulatory regime to implement a policy of telecommunication liberalisation represents essentially a problem of institutional change. The thesis demonstrates that the bargaining approach to policy-making in the telecommunication sector has allowed, and even facilitated, the first stage of reforms but that it is ill-suited for participation in a supranational framework

Transferring standards: lessons from GSM-R in the railway sector

In the mid 1990s the European railway community – under the aegis of the Union Internationale des Chemins de fer (UIC) – opted for GSM as the standard to replace existing analogue railway radio systems. The decision was taken on two grounds: GSM was a non-proprietary standard (i.e. open standard) and it fulfilled the needs of railway operators. Other arguments put forward to support the choice was that choosing GSM would have the advantage to remain close to the development of the public market and to benefit from the experience on the applications and products level. This paper looks at the transfer of a telecommunication standard to another industry (railways). In particular it studies whether the adoption of an “extended” version of the GSM standard (GSM-R) turned out to be an efficient choice. Unlike the telecommunication sector, the railway sector does not have a UN forum like the ITU where railway stakeholders can come together to solve technical and standardization issues – that role is carried out in large parts by UIC, ETSI and other standardization bodies and increasingly by the European Railway Agency (ERA). Whereas the telecommunication sector has been undergoing liberalization for more than 20 years the European railway sector is by-and-large only beginning its reform process. The aim of creating a single European railway market has not been facilitated by the existence and persistence of strong technical boundaries at the national level. The transfer and deployment of GSM-R is of strategic importance to the success of another European railway project – European Railway Train Management System (ERTMS) – since the introduction of the new signaling system rests on achieving interoperability in radio-communication

Structuring Conversations Around Course Design

Constructive alignment helps both students and teachers to achieve intended learning outcomes. The workshop proposes to introduce participants to the elements and mechanics of the pedagogical coherence canvas (PCC), a tool developed to improve constructive alignment throughout course design. Participants will familiarise themselves with the process by applying it to the design of a course or training. This hands-on workshop will help participants to develop a practical understanding of how to use the PCC to design a course following constructive alignment principles

Dealing with standardization in liberalized network industries: Some lessons from the European railway sector

The European railway sector is undergoing dramatic changes. During the still ongoing liberalization process most vertically-integrated railway operators have already been “unbundled”. The shift from integrated to disintegrated companies coupled with the introduction of competition – so far in freight, but as of 2010 also in international passenger traffic – is having profound implications on the development and deployment of new technologies. In addition, within the framework of the Single European Market the main stakeholders have now to work under the constraint of interoperability. The paper examines railway standardization processes within an interoperable environment. So far, the railway sector has a strong history of national standards development. In the area of signalling, the result and current situation is therefore a patchwork of poorly interoperable systems. The paper builds on a case study of the development and deployment of a core signalling system – the European Rail Train Management System (ERTMS) – to illustrate the difficulties to coordinate a standardization process in such a liberalized and deregulated environment. The paper questions whether, in the framework of the emerging technological and institutional environment, the current governance of rail standards is suited to the EU’s objectives of a competitive railway market. Through the introduction of ERTMS the paper discusses the role of the new European Rail Agency (ERA) as the locus for coordinating the ERTMS standardization process. It makes recommendations as to which actor(s) is/are best suited to govern the standardization of such highly complex and interdependent technical systems

Shanghai 2012: Réflexions sur le processus de sélection des participants à un projet d'apprentissage expérientiel dans un marché émergent

La littérature sur l’apprentissage expérientiel in situ couvre de manière très succincte le processus de sélection des participants (modalités et critères). La présente communication a pour objectif d’approfondir cette problématique au travers d’une réflexion sur la sélection de participants à un voyage d’études de courte durée dans un marché émergent

Regulating Europe's single railway market: Integrating performance and governance

Regulation of the European railway sector remains a central issue in the framework of the current liberalization process. From a regulatory perspective, the patchwork of national legislations and the delays in transposing and implementing the European Directives bears witness to the difficulty of creating a single European railway market. The paper argues that, as a result of failing to consider the importance of the technical nature of railways, the notions of coordination and regulation are too often looked at from a single perspective – mostly economic performance. Policy-makers should ask the question “what to regulate for”? Indeed, the type, the scope, the timing and the required institutional setting of regulation will differ largely depending on the kind of performances one desires to achieve – these can be, among others, financial, social, technical or operational. The answer to this question not only has important implications on the regulation of national rail sectors but also on achieving the creation of a single European railway market. The paper is divided into five sections. The first section briefly traces back the history of European rail and shows that the European railway network is quite specific in international comparison. The second section describes the salient points of the European railway liberalization program. It highlights the heterogeneous nature of the sector. The next section identifies a number of challenges which arise from the confrontation of Europe's historical railways and the current policy objective and liberalization process. It uses as an example of governance issue the development and implementation of a new pan- European signalling technology – the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS). The fourth section describes regulatory objectives (including regulating for economic, operational, social or technical performance). The last section asks whether the current regulatory framework answers the challenges posed by the fragmentation resulting from the historical and political evolution of the sector and how the objective of a European single railway market can be achieved in the current institutional setting. It proposed to develop a regulatory governance specific to the European railway sector based on a broad notion of performance

Systemic risk in the network industries: is there a governance gap?

Systemic risks and hazards have become increasingly significant features of modern industrial society of which the network industries form a vital element. The idea of systemic risk, however, is much less prominent in the network industries compared to banking and finance. This paper addresses why there is such a difference between these sectors. It then addresses how complexity and systemic risk in the network industries should be managed and governed. Does it above all require more and better scientific and technical analysis to understand the risks and reduce uncertainty? Or does it require qualitatively different forms of governance that draw on many different types of knowledge, and involve a wider range of stakeholders? We argue in this paper that systemic risk is very important in the network industries and it needs to be a considered more explicitly than hitherto in the governance and regulation of risk in the network industries. Traditional technocratic forms of risk management and governance while necessary are not sufficient, particularly due because of heightened uncertainty and interdependence. Unless and until the problems of uncertainty are overcome, means of governing risk and uncertainty beyond the technocratic are required. In particular, judgements by different experts and stakeholders are required about the nature of the uncertainty, about the potential hazards and their consequences, and about the level of caution required. This requires a more participative and open form of risk governance, a form which draws on socio-political forms of governance as well as technocratic. This is recognised in part in the recent literature on risk governance of critical infrastructures but the literature says little about the participative governance structures which might be appropriate nor how they may be developed in the patchwork that is the European regulatory environment for the network industries

Governance of innovation in the European railway sector

The European railway sector has undergone major transformations over the past two decades. Domestic reforms have been buttressed by European directives aimed at creating a single European railway market. In this new environment roles have been significantly redistributed, leading to new organizational models. A new and dynamic equilibrium is emerging, to which all railway stakeholders are trying to adapt. The paper looks at the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) from the innovation perspective. It argues that the concurrent liberalization of the sector and the technical harmonization (via the introduction of a pan-European signaling technology) have fragmented the railway sector on different levels (e.g. technological and organizational). The difficulties in developing and deploying a pan-European standard attest to the necessity of re-thinking innovation processes in the railway sector, particularly when those relate simultaneously to infrastructure management and operations. Among others, a broad consensus/alignment of the stakeholders on the type of performances aimed for (e.g. social, technical, operational, environmental or financial) need to be explicitly integrated in railway market organization models and by extension in railway innovation models. The article contributes to the analysis of innovation in large technical systems (LTS) by introducing a framework of performance objectives for the governance of innovation in LTS

Building a Question-Answering Chatbot using Forum Data in the Semantic Space

We build a conversational agent which knowledge base is an online forum for parents of autistic children. We collect about 35,000 threads totalling some 600,000 replies, and label 1% of them for usefulness using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We train a Random Forest Classifier using sent2vec features to label the remaining thread replies. Then, we use word2vec to match user queries conceptually with a thread, and then a reply with a predefined context window