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Youth Online Participation and Consultative Processes: Report on a pilot project in "Better Futures”(2009)ReportThis report describes a pilot project commissioned by the New South Wales (NSW) Minister for Youth (The Hon Graham West MP) and the NSW Department of Community services (DoCS) to explore and test the use of online social networking technologies for the purpose of engaging young people in civic affairs. The project team consisted of members from DoCs, The Office of the Minister, The national Transport and Logistics Centre (TALC), the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the NSW Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP), the NSW Youth Advisory Council and Small World: Social Media Experts (a social networking and new media company). Stakeholders’ consist of the commissioning bodies, the project team and the young people in the regions identified. The aims of the pilot project were to: Explore how online social networking technologies can be used to engage young people aged 9-18 to better inform NSW government decision making Use the NSW Better Futures programme framework in the Central Coast and North Coast NSW regions of DoCS as the focus for the pilot project to see if and how young people would engage in making decisions about expenditure in their local areas under the framework Propose a list of projects selected by young people in Central Cost and North Coast NSW for funding by the program. The pilot involved a field study in the two regions which took place from mid January to the end of April 2009. It was conducted in both electronic and physical spaces in six phases, beginning with face-to-face interviews with young people to gain insight into potential areas in which the proposal money could be used and to learn about their online behaviour patterns. From this information a short list of proposals was developed. The short list comprised of five areas young people viewed as important: 1) environmental issues such as awareness-raising and activities such as planting more trees, 2) provision of spaces for young people to hang out, 3) provision of skate, surf and BMX competitions and workshops, 4) access to sporting equipment and 5) under 18 music events with local bands and artists. An interactive online game was designed to encourage young people to express their preferences on the proposals in the short list. A “viral” campaign was then developed and implemented to attract young people in the regions to the game and to encourage them to vote. By experimenting with different engagement strategies – that integrated the use of a website, digital media, social media sites such as MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube, blog and forums, local radio, TV and school newsletters announcements – the pilot project attracted and motivated young people to express their preferences about youth projects to be funded by DoCS in the “Better Futures” program (for 9-18 years old) in the two targeted regions. In two months (mid February until mid April 2009) 8,200 “friends” were created; there were approximately 70 visitors per day to the website and 2,026 young people voted for the nominated projects. Learning from the project included: - That young people will engage with NSW government decision making through social networking sites - That overall all young people in both regions voted for music events as their first preference. - That only the MySpace poll was able to identify the regional affiliation of voters. IP addresses and other geographic screening mechanisms were not as effective as anticipated. The MySpace poll indicated that there were regional differences with the second and third choices in the North Coast being places for young people to hang out and expenditure on environmental issues and the second and third preferences from the Central Coast were sporting competitions and equipment. - As participation and voting occurred largely in response to activity generated in the targeted areas by the campaign it is likely that voting or any other participation from young people outside the areas targeted is extremely low. - That further development of voting instruments and other participatory tools is required to enable deeper analysis of the ranking of votes and the geographic location of participants. The pilot project was deemed to be very successful by the majority of project team as much was learned which will inform the development of future youth online participation projects. Young people were attracted participate through their social networking sites and engaged in decision making via interviews, online comments and various voting tools. The trial was able to indicate that music events were the most popular of the projects proposed and the MySpace tool was able to identify regional differences for second and third preferences. Young people responded positively by voting and in comments.
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(2005)Journal ArticleSoftware architecture evaluation involves evaluating different architecture design alternatives against multiple quality-attributes. These attributes typically have intrinsic conflicts and must be considered simultaneously in order to reach a final design decision. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), an important decision making technique, has been leveraged to resolve such conflicts. AHP can help provide an overall ranking of design alternatives. However it lacks the capability to explicitly identify the exact tradeoffs being made and the relative size of these tradeoffs. Moreover, the ranking produced can be sensitive such that the smallest change in intermediate priority weights can alter the final order of design alternatives. In this paper, we propose several in-depth analysis techniques applicable to AHP to identify critical tradeoffs and sensitive points in the decision process. We apply our method to an example of a real-world distributed architecture presented in the literature. The results are promising in that they make important decision consequences explicit in terms of key design tradeoffs and the architecture`s capability to handle future quality attribute changes. These expose critical decisions which are otherwise too subtle to be detected in standard AHP results.
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(2005)Book ChapterProduct failure due to consumer separation from the design process can cause customer dissatisfaction and damage to businesses. This article focuses on the concept of virtual collaborative design and analyses the benefits and the barriers to online user collaboration in the early stages of the design process for product development. Furthermore, the article reports findings based on a survey study conducted with four potential stakeholders; representative of consumers, software designers, industrial designers, and manufacturers.
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(2009)Journal ArticleThis paper provides the first full description of the status of Australian institutional repositories. Australia presents an interesting case because of the government’s support of institutional repositories and open access. A survey of all 39 Australian universities conducted in September 2008 shows that 32 institutions have active repositories and by end of 2009, 37 should have repositories. The total number of open access items has risen dramatically since January 2006. Five institutions reported they have an institution–wide open access mandate, and eight are planning to implement one. Only 20 universities have funding for their repository staff and 24 universities have funding for their repository platform, either as ongoing recurrent budgeting or absorbed into their institutions’ budgets. The remaining are still project funded. The platform most frequently used for Australian repositories is Fedora with Vital. Most of the remaining sites use EPrints or DSpace.
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(2008)Conference PaperThe paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an approach to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This modular approach to defining business flows as technology independent services has gained unanimous popularity among end-users and technology vendors alike. Although there is a significant amount of research ongoing on the technology implementations of service oriented architectures (SOAs), there is a paucity of research literature on the factors affecting the adoption of service-oriented computing and the realization of business value in practice. This paper empirically examines the adoption of SOC as an enterprise strategy across fifteen firms, and discusses the organizational constraints that influence the enterprise adoption and implementation of SOA. In doing so, this paper fills a crucial gap in the academic literature about the practical use of SOA as an enterprise strategy for agility, and lays the groundwork for future work on SOA alignment with organizational strategy. The paper also provides practitioners with guidelines for the successful implementation of SOA to achieve business value.
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(2007)Conference PaperThe paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an architectural approach to flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. There is, however, a paucity of critical research assessing the strategic impact of SOA on the competitiveness of organizations. Some research literature in strategic management indicates that firms may gain a competitive advantage in rapidly changing market environments by concentrating on their dynamic capabilities – i.e., product flexibility and agility in organizational transformation in response to rapidly changing market conditions and customer requirements. The intent of this paper is to analyze the conduits through which service-oriented architectures (SOAs) may exert influence on dynamic capabilities within firms. The results could potentially assist in evaluating if and how the adoption of service-oriented architecture may help achieve key dynamic capabilities, giving the enterprise a competitive edge.
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(2008)Conference PaperValue based requirements engineering plays a critical role in software development because it seeks to align requirements with the organizational strate-gy that drives business value. This paper discusses the value proposition of ser-vice-oriented architectures and proposes a value-based decision mechanism for requirements engineering for service oriented systems. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for future research into the important but relatively unexplored area of service oriented requirements engineering.
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(1998)Journal ArticleYBa2Cu3O7-y with high grain alignment has been successfully fabricated by a modified powder melting process at a temperature of ~930oC which is near the eutectic point of the starting materials Y2BaCuO5, BaCuO2, and CuO. In terms of the levitation force and YBa2Cu3O7-y grain alignment, the best result was shown in a sample having a Y2BaCuO5:BaCuO2:CuO molecular ratio of 1:3:5. In the present work, the Cu-surplus eutectic liquid was completely absorbed by use of a Y2BaCuO5 substrate, by which the final composition was driven to stoichiometric YBa2Cu3O7-y. The results were comparable to those obtained by the conventional melt-texture-growth process. A new invariant point apparently occurred at ~930-940oC owing to an interfacial reaction between YBa2Cu3O7-y matrix and Y2BaCuO5 substrate.
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(2008)Conference PaperFinancial service institutions are pursuing organizational agility in the face of an increasingly competitive marketplace, and are consequently looking infrastructure technologies that enable process and infrastructure agility. Service-oriented computing (SOC) appears to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This paper empirically examines the decision to adopt SOC as an enterprise strategy across fifteen firms, and investigates the business drivers that influence the enterprise adoption of SOA. In doing so, this paper adds crucial empirical evidence to the formal academic literature about the business case for SOA as an enterprise strategy, and lays the groundwork for future work on SOA alignment with business strategy.