URBAN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Examining Stakeholder Perspectives: Process, Performance and Progress of the Age-Friendly Taiwan Program.

Since Taiwans age-friendly city (AFC) program was launched in 2012, the central government has provided various resources to the countrys 22 local authorities, including budgetary support, policy advocacy, and consultation from a team of experts. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on the process, performance, and outcome of the AFC program. A 53-item questionnaire was developed based on the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, including mechanisms and processes (20 items), outcome evaluations (23 items), and resource integration (10 items). There was a great difference found among scores between facilitators and experts for inter-exchange experience with local and international cities (40%) and monitor and revise indicators (37%) in mechanisms and processes, evaluate performance of indicators and action plans (37%) in outcome evaluations, and interaction between government and community (46%) and interaction between civil organization and senior society (39%) in resource integration. Clearly, facilitators showed overly optimistic assessments in AFC mechanisms and processes, outcome evaluation, and resource integration. The results showed disconnect between experts expectations versus actual practice conducted by facilitators. Implications of these findings are to integrate top down expectations with the realities of bottom up practice to design more realistic evaluations; continue to educate stakeholders about design, implementation and evaluation; and further integrate resources from government, civil organizations, and community

From certain minimal surfaces in the 5-sphere to minimal Lagrangian submanifolds of the 3-dimensional complex projective space

In a previous paper it was shown how to associate with a Lagrangian submanifold satisfying Chen's equality in 3-dimensional complex projective space, a minimal surface in the 5-sphere with ellipse of curvature is a circle. In this paper we focus on the reverse construction