Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer

Across the nation, artistic and cultural practices are helping to define the sustainability of urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods. In the design of parks and open spaces; the building of public transit, housing, and supermarkets; in plans for addressing needs for community health and healing trauma; communities are embracing arts and culture strategies to help create equitable communities of opportunity where everyone can participate, prosper, and achieve their full potential. And artists are seeing themselves -- and being seen by others -- as integral community members whose talents, crafts, and insights pave the way to support community engagement and cohesion."Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer" highlights both promising and proven practices that demonstrate equity-focused arts and culture policies, strategies, and tools. The report describes the role of arts and culture across the nine sectors below. Within each policy chart there are goals, policies, and implementation strategies that can help achieve communities of opportunity. These policies have yielded such outcomes as: support for Native artists in reservation-based cultural economies, the creation of a citywide cultural plan, engaging low-income youth of color in using digital media, and efforts to address redevelopment, employment, food access, and environmental justice

Primary Runoff Elections and Decline in Voter Turnout

Ten states hold primary runoff elections if no candidate wins a majority of the votes in a major party's primary: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina (30% threshold), and South Dakota (35% threshold).This report studies three decades of primary runoff elections. Based on turnout declines, disparate outcomes for voters of color, and high costs of runoff elections, FairVote recommends ranked choice voting, also known as instant runoff voting, as a way to preserve the goals of runoff elections while solving their pervasive issues

A Deeper Shade of Blue: A Compositional Folio Informed by Ethnographic Research into the Sydney Jazz Scene

This folio contains scores and audio recordings of five original compositions with critical commentary and ethnographic investigation. The research aims to test existing concepts of an Australian jazz identity and create new constructs for how music is created by a practicing jazz composer and performer. The research presents the results elicited from 11 interviews with selected Sydney jazz scene participants, providing an oral account of the way they create, conceive and perceive jazz music in Sydney and to compare evidence. In the five compositions I research various ways of integrating improvisation, non-Western and Australian influences into jazz and classical music contexts. I provide a case study of eclecticism and the role of improvisation in shaping programmatic goals with specific reference of my major work Iron in the Blood: Music Inspired by Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore for jazz orchestra and two narrators. The other works include River Meeting Suite for saxophone quartet, sitar, vocals, tabla and iphone, Oneirology for saxophone quartet and piano, Between Worlds for string quartet and saxophone and Border Control for flute, piccolo, bass clarinet, trumpet and vibraphone. This research addresses some of the deficiencies in the literature on Sydney jazz and creative music and illuminates the creative practices lying behind the creation of localised jazz identities through a case study of my composition portfolio and creative process. By expanding discussion beyond my own compositions, this project helps flesh out how “Australian” approaches to jazz composition, are realised across the Sydney scene and how these are distinct from other locales of jazz music production around the world. My perspective as a significant stakeholder within the jazz community, given that I am a performer, composer, performing artist, band manager and label director provides the research with a unique credibility and valuable insight into the field

A Deeper Shade of Blue: A Compositional Folio Informed by Ethnographic Research into the Sydney Jazz Scene

This folio contains scores and audio recordings of five original compositions with critical commentary and ethnographic investigation. The research aims to test existing concepts of an Australian jazz identity and create new constructs for how music is created by a practicing jazz composer and performer. The research presents the results elicited from 11 interviews with selected Sydney jazz scene participants, providing an oral account of the way they create, conceive and perceive jazz music in Sydney and to compare evidence. In the five compositions I research various ways of integrating improvisation, non-Western and Australian influences into jazz and classical music contexts. I provide a case study of eclecticism and the role of improvisation in shaping programmatic goals with specific reference of my major work Iron in the Blood: Music Inspired by Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore for jazz orchestra and two narrators. The other works include River Meeting Suite for saxophone quartet, sitar, vocals, tabla and iphone, Oneirology for saxophone quartet and piano, Between Worlds for string quartet and saxophone and Border Control for flute, piccolo, bass clarinet, trumpet and vibraphone. This research addresses some of the deficiencies in the literature on Sydney jazz and creative music and illuminates the creative practices lying behind the creation of localised jazz identities through a case study of my composition portfolio and creative process. By expanding discussion beyond my own compositions, this project helps flesh out how “Australian” approaches to jazz composition, are realised across the Sydney scene and how these are distinct from other locales of jazz music production around the world. My perspective as a significant stakeholder within the jazz community, given that I am a performer, composer, performing artist, band manager and label director provides the research with a unique credibility and valuable insight into the field

Mapping eParticipation Research: Four Central Challenges

The emerging research area of eParticipation can be characterized as the study of technology-facilitated citizen participation in (democratic) deliberation and decision-making. Using conventional literature study techniques, we identify 105 articles that are considered to be highly relevant to eParticipation. We develop a definitional schema that suggests different ways of understanding an emerging socio-technical research area and use this schema to map the research contributions identified. This allows us make an initial sketch of the scientific character of the area and its central concerns, theories, and methods. We extend the analysis to define four central research challenges for the field: understanding technology and participation; the strategic challenge; the design challenge; and the evaluation challenge. This article thus contributes to a developing account of eParticipation, which will help future researchers both to navigate the research area and to focus their research agendas

Activity Based Generation of Requirements for Web-Based Information Systems: The SSM/ICDT Approach

Web site development method is at an early stage in its evolution. Most existing methods are concerned with technical software issues and are poorly adapted to help developers think about fundamental changes to existing business models that Web-based environments make possible. In addition, traditional methods of requirements elicitation dependent on users are often impractical. The approach described in this paper combines the well-tested ability of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to deliver useful models of business process (human activity systems), with recent thinking about mature Internet business strategies from INSEAD. Mapping the four virtual spaces of the ICDT model (information, communication, distribution and transaction) onto business activity models via a simple matrix ensures a reasonably sophisticated view of Web site potential, and ties it firmly to fundamental business processes. The approach, which is simple to learn and a small overhead in terms of development effort, is illustrated with a case study