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The Emergent Qualities Of Diversity In Free And Open Source Software Communities
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Book Synopsis The Emergent Qualities of Diversity in Free and Open Source Software Communities by : J. Victor Kuechler
Download or read book The Emergent Qualities of Diversity in Free and Open Source Software Communities written by J. Victor Kuechler and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free and open source software (FOSS) projects primarily rely on the efforts of volunteer contributors from around the world. For this reason, recruiting and retaining contributor is vital to the sustainability and growth of FOSS projects. This notion became the jumping-off point for this three-part investigation into the cultural structure and social dynamics of the FOSS community. In Chapter 2, we analyzed mailing list discussions initiated by newcomers to a FOSS project and found that receiving timely and supportive responses was positively correlated to newcomers' future participation. In Chapter 3, we examined mailing list subscription logs, and found a disproportional attrition rate among women along every step of the FOSS joining process, further documentation of a well-known lack of gender diversity in FOSS. Finally, in Chapter 4, we examined the current demographic composition of the FOSS community, and the lack of diversity in a more general sense, as well as the mechanisms that perpetuate this situation. We present two theoretical frameworks--group faultlines theory and critical systems thinking, that can help explain this current homogeneity, as well as guide future research.
Book Synopsis A Business Ecology Perspective on Community-Driven Open Source by : Markus Radits
Download or read book A Business Ecology Perspective on Community-Driven Open Source written by Markus Radits and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2019-01-25 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis approaches the phenomenon of open source software (OSS) from a managerial and organisational point of view. In a slightly narrower sense, this thesis studies commercialisation aspects around community-driven open source. The term ‘community-driven’ signifies open source projects that are managed, steered, and controlled by communities of volunteers, as opposed to those that are managed, steered, and controlled by single corporate sponsors. By adopting a business ecology perspective, this thesis places emphasis on the larger context within which the commercialisation of OSS is embedded (e.g., global and collaborative production regimes, ideological foundations, market characteristics, and diffuse boundary conditions). Because many business benefits arise as a consequence of the activities taking place in the communities and ecosystems around open source projects, a business ecology perspective may be a useful analytical guide for understanding the opportunities, challenges, and risks that firms face in commercializing OSS. There are two overarching themes guiding this thesis. The first theme concerns the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. There is a tendency in the literature on business ecosystems and open source to emphasise the benefits, opportunities, and positive aspects of behaviour, at the expense of the challenges that firms face. However, business ecosystems are not only spaces of opportunity, they may also pose a variety of challenges that firms need to overcome in order to be successful. To help rectify this imbalance in the literature, the first theme particularly focuses on the challenges that firms face in commercialising community-driven open source. The underlying ambition is to facilitate a more balanced and holistic understanding of the collaborative and competitive dynamics in ecosystems around open source projects. The other theme concerns the complex intertwining of community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. As is acknowledged in the literature, the subject of firm-community interaction has become increasingly important because the survival, success, and sustainability of peer production communities has become of strategic relevance to many organisations. However, while many strategic benefits may arise as a consequence of firm-community interaction, there is a lack of research studying how the value-creating logics of firm–community interaction are embedded within the bigger picture in which they occur. Bearing this bigger picture in mind, this thesis explores the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing by focusing on four aspects that are theorised in the literature: reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity. This thesis is designed as a qualitative exploratory single-case study. The empirical case is Joomla, a popular open source content management system. In a nutshell, the Joomla case in this thesis comprises the interactions in the Joomla community and the commercial activities around the Joomla platform (e.g., web development, consulting, marketing, customisation, extensions). In order to achieve greater analytical depth, the business ecology perspective is complemented with ideas and propositions from other theoretical areas, such as stakeholder theory, community governance, organizational identity, motivation theory, pricing, and bundling. The findings show that the common challenges in commercialising community-driven open source revolve around nine distinct factors that roughly cluster into three domains: the ecosystem, the community, and the firm. In short, the domain of the ecosystem comprises the global operating environment, the pace of change, and the cannibalisation of ideas. The domain of the community comprises the platform policy, platform image, and the voluntary nature of the open source project. And finally, the domain of the firm comprises the blurring boundaries between private and professional lives, the difficulty of estimating costs, and firm dependencies. Based on these insights, a framework for analysing community-based value creation in business ecosystems is proposed. This framework integrates collective innovation, community engagement, and value capture into a unified model of value creation in contexts of firm–community interaction. Furthermore, the findings reveal demonstrable effects of reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity in the intertwining of volunteer community engagement and profit-oriented venturing. By showing that this intertwining can be strong in empirical cases where commercial activities are often implicitly assumed to be absent, this thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of firm involvement in the realm of open source. Based on the empirical and analytical insights, a number of further theoretical implications are discussed, such as the role of intersubjective trust in relation to the uncertainties that commercial actors face, an alternative way of classifying community types, the metaphor of superorganisms in the context of open source, issues pertaining to the well-being of community participants, and issues in relation to the transitioning of open source developers from a community-based to an entrepreneurial self-identity when commercialising an open source solution. Furthermore, this thesis builds on six sub-studies that make individual contributions of their own. In a broad sense, this thesis contributes to the literature streams on the commercialisation of OSS, the business value and strategic aspects of open source, the interrelationships between community forms of organising and entrepreneurial activities, and the nascent research on ecology perspectives on peer-production communities. A variety of opportunities for future research are highlighted. Denna avhandling undersöker fenomenet öppen källkod, ’open source’, ur ett lednings och styrningsperspektiv. Mer konkret studeras aspekter på kommersialisering av ett community-drivet open source projekt (OSS, open source software). Uttrycket ’community-drivet’ hänvisar till open source projekt som drivs och styrs av volontärgrupper, till skillnad från open source projekt som drivs och styrs av enskilda företag. Genom att tillämpa ett affärsekologiperspektiv fokuserar denna avhandling på det vidare sammanhang som karaktäriserar kommersialisering av OSS, såsom globala och kollaborativa produktionssystem, värderingarna öppenhet och samarbete, marknadsstrukturer, och diffusa organisationsgränser. Aktiviteterna i open source communityn och dess kringliggande ekosystem kan bidra till många fördelar för företag, och därför kan ett affärsekologiperspektiv vara en användbar analytisk lins för att förstå de möjligheter, utmaningar och risker som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar OSS. Två övergripande teman lyfts fram i denna avhandling. Det första temat handlar om de utmaningar som företag står inför när de kommersialiserar community-driven OSS. Det finns i litteraturen om affärsekologier och open source en tendens att betona fördelar, möjligheter och positiva aspekter på beteende på bekostnad av att undersöka utmaningar som företag står inför. Affärsekologier innebär dock inte enbart möjligheter för företag, utan kan också orsaka en rad utmaningar som företag behöver hantera för att lyckas. Med utgångspunkt i denna obalans i litteraturen fokuserar det första temat på de utmaningar med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS. Detta görs för att bidra till en mer balanserad och holistisk förståelse av den på samma gång kollaborativa och konkurrerande dynamiken i affärsekologin runt ett open source projekt. Det andra temat handlar om sammanflätningen (intertwining) mellan community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet. Såsom det framgår i litteraturen har frågan om samverkan mellan företag och communities blivit allt viktigare, eftersom communityernas överlevnad, framgång och hållbarhet har blivit strategiskt viktiga för många organisationer. Även om många strategiska fördelar kan uppstå som en följd av samverkan mellan företag och communities saknas forskning om hur värdeskapande uppstår i en vidare kontext. Med ett bredare perspektiv i åtanke undersöker denna avhandling sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och en vinstdrivande verksamhet genom att fokusera på fyra aspekter av sammanflätning som förekommer i litteraturen: förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Denna avhandling är utformad som en kvalitativ utforskande fallstudie. Det empiriska fallet är Joomla, ett innehållshanteringssystem som bygger på open source. Inom ramen för avhandlingen undersöks fallet i termer av samspel inom Joomla-communityn och de kommersiella aktiviteterna som sker runt Joomla-plattformen (t.ex., webbutveckling, rådgivning, marknadsföring, anpassningar, och extensions). För att uppnå ett analytiskt djup kompletteras affärsekologiperspektivet med idéer och förslag från andra teoretiska områden, såsom intressentmodellen, community-styrning, företagsidentitet, motivationsteori, prissättning, och buntning. Resultaten visar att utmaningarna med kommersialisering av community-driven OSS kretsar kring nio olika faktorer som kan grupperas i tre områden: ekosystemet, communityn, och företaget. Ekosystemsfaktorerna innefattar den globala verksamma miljön, förändringshastigheten och kannibalisering av idéer. Community-faktorerna innefattar plattformspolicy, plattformsimage, och att deltagandet i open source projektet sker på frivillig basis. Slutligen innefattar företagsfaktorerna suddiga gränser mellan privatliv och arbetsliv, svårigheten att uppskatta kostnader samt beroendeförhållanden mellan företag. Baserat på dessa insikter föreslås en modell för att analysera communitybaserad värdeskapande i affärsekologier. Modellen integrerar kollektiv innovation, community-deltagande, och value capture i en holistisk modell för community-baserad värdeskapande i kontexten samverkan mellan företag och communities. Vidare beskrivs effekterna av sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet i termer av förstärkning, komplementaritet, synergi, och ömsesidighet. Genom att visa att sammanflätningen av frivilligt community-deltagande och vinstdrivande verksamhet kan vara stark i fall där det ofta antas implicit att kommersiella aktiviteter inte förekommer ger denna avhandling en mer nyanserad förståelse av företags roll i kontexten open source. Baserat på empiriska och analytiska insikter diskuterar denna avhandling ett antal teoretiska konsekvenser, såsom rollen som intersubjektiv tillit spelar i förhållande till den ovisshet som kommersiella aktörer står inför, ett alternativt sätt att klassificera community-typer, metaforen superorganismer i kontexten open source, community-deltagares välbefinnande, samt hur open source utvecklare hanterar övergången från en community-baserad självidentitet till en entreprenöriell självidentitet vid kommersialisering av OSS. Dessutom ger de sex delstudier som avhandlingen bygger på egna bidrag som presenteras i respektive delstudie. I stora drag bidrar denna avhandling till litteraturen om kommersialisering av OSS, affärsmässiga och strategiska aspekter på open source, samspelet mellan community-driven entreprenörsverksamhet samt den framväxande forskning som använder ett affärsekologiperspektiv för att studera kollegial produktion baserad på allmännytta. En mängd olika möjligheter för framtida forskning lyfts fram.
Book Synopsis Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software by : Joseph Feller
Download or read book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software written by Joseph Feller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading Free and Open Source software researchers and analysts consider the status of the open source revolution and its effect on industry and society.
Download or read book Superdiversity written by Steven Vertovec and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social “difference” have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Book Synopsis Free/open Source Software Development by : Stefan Koch
Download or read book Free/open Source Software Development written by Stefan Koch and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Free/Open Source Software Development" uses a multitude of research approaches to explore free and open source software development processes, attributes of their products, and the workings within the development communities.
Book Synopsis Microbial Responses to Environmental Changes by : Jürg B. Logue
Download or read book Microbial Responses to Environmental Changes written by Jürg B. Logue and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2016-01-20 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in next generation sequencing technologies, omics, and bioinformatics are revealing a tremendous and unsuspected diversity of microbes, both at a compositional and functional level. Moreover, the expansion of ecological concepts into microbial ecology has greatly advanced our comprehension of the role microbes play in the functioning of ecosystems across a wide range of biomes. Super-imposed on this new information about microbes, their functions and how they are organized, environmental gradients are changing rapidly, largely driven by direct and indirect human activities. In the context of global change, understanding the mechanisms that shape microbial communities is pivotal to predict microbial responses to novel selective forces and their implications at the local as well as global scale. One of the main features of microbial communities is their ability to react to changes in the environment. Thus, many studies have reported changes in the performance and composition of communities along environmental gradients. However, the mechanisms underlying these responses remain unclear. It is assumed that the response of microbes to changes in the environment is mediated by a complex combination of shifts in the physiological properties, single-cell activities, or composition of communities: it may occur by means of physiological adjustments of the taxa present in a community or selecting towards more tolerant/better adapted phylotypes. Knowing whether certain factors trigger one, many, or all mechanisms would greatly increase confidence in predictions of future microbial composition and processes. This Research Topic brings together studies that applied the latest molecular techniques for studying microbial composition and functioning and integrated ecological, biogeochemical and/or modeling approaches to provide a comprehensive and mechanistic perspective of the responses of micro-organisms to environmental changes. This Research Topic presents new findings on environmental parameters influencing microbial communities, the type and magnitude of response and differences in the response among microbial groups, and which collectively deepen our current understanding and knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of microbial structural and functional responses to environmental changes and gradients in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The body of work has, furthermore, identified many challenges and questions that yet remain to be addressed and new perspectives to follow up on.
Book Synopsis Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by :
Download or read book Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by and published by . This book was released on 1973-10 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
Book Synopsis Public Or Private Economies of Knowledge? by : Mark Harvey
Download or read book Public Or Private Economies of Knowledge? written by Mark Harvey and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book embraces a fundamental issue for the modern information economy, namely the creation, negotiation and institutionalization of private and public knowledge. The authors argue that as new biological knowledge develops, the actors must help create and negotiate the boundaries of what can be considered private and public knowledge. By using an Instituted Economic Process approach, the authors come to grips with these dynamics of the economics of knowledge. This approach therefore helps us analyze who is involved, who benefits, and why conflicts occur within an innovation-driven economy. The authors provide very interesting empirical material, as well, because they develop their analytical points, through well-written and thick descriptions of cases from biodata, bioinformatic, and a case of gene sequencing. Hence, this book makes interesting conceptual and empirical contributions, to our understanding of modern biological sciences in the economy. Maureen McKelvey, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden It once was believed that scientific knowledge was public and technological knowledge was proprietary, and this was the way it should be. However, recent developments, particularly in biology, have unsettled this belief. This superb book examines what determines whether a body of knowledge is public or private. The consideration of the theoretical issues is thorough and thoughtful. The study of how things have played out in various fields of biology, and why, is smashing. What the authors have to say is important and fascinating, and makes for a great read. Richard R. Nelson, Columbia University, US The great divide between public and private knowledge in capitalism is an unstable frontier at the core of contemporary economic transformations. Based on research in the USA, Europe and Brazil into the cutting edge of biological science and technology, this book presents a novel framework for understanding this historically shifting fault-line. Over the last quarter of a century, major controversies have accompanied the dramatic developments in biological science and technology. At critical points, leading commercial companies were poised to take ownership over the human genome and much new post-genomic knowledge. The software tools for analysing the deluge of data also appeared, as did expanding new markets for private enterprise. At the same time, huge new public programmes of biological research were accompanied by radical innovation in the institutions and organisation of public knowledge. Would private marketable knowledge dominate over the new public domain or vice versa? Surprisingly, the dynamism and expansion of the public domain, and new forms of differentiation and interdependence between public and private economies of knowledge, now characterise the landscape. This book presents an analytical framework for understanding the shifting great divide in capitalist economies of knowledge. The authors develop a novel economic sociology of innovation, based on the instituted economic process approach. By focusing on economies of knowledge, they seek to demonstrate that capitalism is multi-modal at its core, with interdependent growth of market and non-market modes of production, distribution, exchange and use. Public or Private Economies of Knowledge? will appeal to those with an interest in innovation studies, economic sociology and economic theory.
Download or read book Two Bits written by Christopher M. Kelty and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
Book Synopsis Revolutionizing Innovation by : Dietmar Harhoff
Download or read book Revolutionizing Innovation written by Dietmar Harhoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the emerging paradigm of user and open innovation, offering both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation, pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm, which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Since then, the study of user-driven innovation has continued and expanded, with further empirical exploration of a distributed model of innovation that includes communities and platforms in a variety of contexts and with the development of theory to explain the economic underpinnings of this still emerging paradigm. This volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades. The contributors—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy. The empirical contexts for their studies range from household goods to financial services. After discussing the fundamentals of user innovation, the contributors cover communities and innovation; legal aspects of user and community innovation; new roles for user innovators; user interactions with firms; and user innovation in practice, describing experiments, toolkits, and crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding. Contributors Efe Aksuyek, Yochai Benkler, James Bessen, Jörn H. Block, Annika Bock, Helena Canhão, Jeroen P. J. de Jong, Emmanuelle Fauchart, Dominique Foray, Nikolaus Franke, Johann Füller, Helena Garriga, Fred Gault, Fredrik Hacklin, Dietmar Harhoff, Joachim Henkel, Cornelius Herstatt, Christoph Hienerth, Venkat Kuppuswamy, Karim R. Lakhani, Christopher Lettl, Christian Lüthje, Ethan Mollick, Hidehiko Nishikawa, Alessandro Nuvolari, Susumu Ogawa, Pedro Oliveira, Stefan Perkmann Berger, Frank Piller, Christina Raasch, Susanne Roiser, Fabrizio Salvador, Pamela Samuelson, Tim Schweisfurth, Sonali K. Shah, Christoph Stockstrom, Katherine J. Strandburg, Stefan Thomke, Andrew W. Torrance, Mary Tripsas, Georg von Krogh
Download or read book Cincinnati Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 2003-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cincinnati Magazine taps into the DNA of the city, exploring shopping, dining, living, and culture and giving readers a ringside seat on the issues shaping the region.
Book Synopsis Diversity and Leadership by : Jean Lau Chin
Download or read book Diversity and Leadership written by Jean Lau Chin and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although leadership theories have evolved to reflect changing social contexts, many remain silent on issues of equity, diversity, and social justice. Diversity and Leadership, by Jean Lau Chin and Joseph E. Trimble, offers a new paradigm for examining leadership by bringing together two domains—research on leadership and research on diversity—to challenge existing notions of leadership and move toward a diverse and global view of society and its institutions. This compelling book delivers an approach to leadership that is inclusive, promotes access for diverse leaders, and addresses barriers that narrowly confine our perceptions and expectations of leaders. Redefining leadership as global and diverse, the authors impart new understanding of who our leaders are, the process of communication, exchange between leaders and their members, criteria for selecting, training, and evaluating leaders in the 21st century, and the organizational and societal contexts in which leadership is exercised.
Book Synopsis Democratizing Innovation by : Eric Von Hippel
Download or read book Democratizing Innovation written by Eric Von Hippel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-02-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.
Book Synopsis Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture by : Henry Jenkins
Download or read book Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture written by Henry Jenkins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-06-05 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures—joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention. This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning
Book Synopsis Social Science Research by : Anol Bhattacherjee
Download or read book Social Science Research written by Anol Bhattacherjee and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.
Book Synopsis International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE 2014) by :
Download or read book International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE 2014) written by and published by DEStech Publications, Inc. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CSSE2014 proceeding tends to collect the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and worldwide state-of-art knowledge on Computer Science and Software Engineering. All the accepted papers have been submitted to strict peer-review by 2–4 expert referees, and selected based on originality, significance and clarity for the purpose of the conference. The conference program is extremely rich, profound and featuring high-impact presentations of selected papers and additional late-breaking contributions. We sincerely hope that the conference would not only show the participants a broad overview of the latest research results on related fields, but also provide them with a significant platform for academic connection and exchange. The Technical Program Committee members have been working very hard to meet the deadline of review. The final conference program consists of 126 papers divided into 4 sessions.
Book Synopsis Open Educational Resources by : Unesco
Download or read book Open Educational Resources written by Unesco and published by United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization. This book was released on 2009 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Education systems today face two major challenges: expanding the reach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutions will not suffice, especially in the context of today's knowledge-intensive societies. The Open Educational Resources movement offers one solution for extending the reach of education and expanding learning opportunities. The goal of the movement is to equalise access to knowledge worldwide through openly and freely available online high-quality content. UNESCO has contributed to building global awareness about Open Educational Resources, through facilitating an extended conversation in cyberspace. Over the course of two years, a large and diverse international community came together in a series of online discussion forums to discuss the concept of Open Educational Resources and its potential. In making the background papers and reports from those discussions available for the first time in print, this publication seeks to share even more widely the contributions made by so many. It is intended for all who may be intrigued by the Open Educational Resources movement - its promise and its progress.
