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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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(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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(2009)Conference PaperAt any given time the two rival organizational values cooperation and competition coexist in any team and/or organization in different intensities and mix, depending on both internal factors (e.g., culture, task dimensions of accuracy and speed) and external factors (e.g., market and competitive forces). However, determining that desirable intensity and mix of these two values seems to be a challenging task in the current literature and no explicit method currently exists for measuring factors that may lead to determination of such desirable mix. Considering the crucial impacts of these values on organizational behaviours, this in turn may result in loss of efficiency and productivity in organizations. In this study a systematic review of current literatures in the areas of knowledge management, social psychology, organizational studies and Computer-Supported Cooperative Systems (CSCW) studies, is used to uncover a research theme for analysing the impacts of the two rival organizational values competition and cooperation on knowledge sharing behaviours through promotive interaction between individuals. Supporting the IT-culture conflict theory, this study is considered as a research theme which investigates the impact of culture on IT application and use. More specifically, by combining the goal interdependency theory of conflict, social learning theory, the internal organizational forces of competition and cooperation and the awareness net analysis, the present study deeply investigate the term tension between cooperative and competitive values and their impact on organizational behaviours. It then introduces factors that can assist in finding an optimal mix of the cooperative and competitive values in organizations at any given time. The present study also relates the above optimal mix/tension with the organization’s reward structure, the task dimensions of ‘speed’ and ‘accuracy’, group characteristics and organizational climate in order to draw inferences for attaining an optimal level of process awareness for individuals while performing their tasks within an organization.
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(2010)Journal ArticleThis paper investigates the academization of library and information science (LIS)educators in Australia from 1959 to 2008. Extensive data document the distribution of these academics in Australian higher education institutions over fifty years: from a slow beginning in the 1960s, to rapid growth in the 1970s, relative stability in the 1980s, and a persistent decline from the 1990s. Results of other characteristics of Australian LIS educators over the fifty-year period are presented including: previous positions held before entering academia, what and where academic qualifications were obtained, academic positions/ranks by gender, mobility within Australian higher education institutions, and years spent as Australian LIS educators. Although there has been a steady decline in the number of Australian LIS educators since the 1990s, the level of academic qualifications and percentage with doctorates have risen, thus conforming to a major requirement of academia; however, the relative decline in junior academic positions is a worrying trend. The analysis of changed characteristics over time helps define who Australian LIS academics are, and additionally provides data that contributes to LIS academic workforce planning.
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(2010)Journal ArticleConducting a literature review is a vital part of any research. Library and information science (LIS) professionals often play a central role in supporting academics in their efforts to locate relevant publications and in teaching novice researchers skills associated with literature reviews. This paper examines literature review processes with the aim to contribute to better understanding of their complexity and uncertainty and to propose a new approach to literature reviews that is capable of dealing with such complexity and uncertainty.
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(2010)Conference PaperThis paper investigates the concept of information. It follows different approaches for defining information before discussing a knowledge-in-action view on information as part of sociomaterial practices. Drawing from Stamper’s (1991) extended semiological framework the paper proposes its reinterpretation to study information as a sociomaterial phenomenon. The paper further argues that rather than focusing on finding general definitions for information, intellectual efforts should concentrate on characteristics and attributes of information. Combining earlier efforts in this direction different attributes of information such as novelty, time dependence, or goal relevance. are introduced. Locating those attributes within Stamper's extended semiological framework helps to identify different aspects of sociomaterial context affecting information. Understanding and paying attention to information through its attributes can, therefore, provide guidance for researching information and possibly help advancing the development of information systems.
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(2010)Journal ArticleThis article explores some of the issues associated with giving non-human actors a voice of their own in actor-network theory based research. What issues do we face in doing so? Does doing so increase understanding of the issue to hand, bring to life and make more accessible and interesting the stories of these actors? Or does this anthropomorphism detract from the issues at hand? We discuss these broader issues and then present some findings from an ANT field study which investigated the implementation of institutional repositories and their relations with the spread of open access to scholarly publishing. We experiment with allowing some of the non-human actors to speak for themselves. We conclude with a discussion which opens the debate: does giving voice to non-human actors bring them to life and make them better understood as intimately entangled with each other and human actors in the sociomaterial practices of the everyday? And what are the challenges in doing so?
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(2010)ThesisSimultaneous achievement of both sales and service performance goals by retail service teams is of critical importance to retail organisations. The success of retail organisations as a whole is essentially reliant on the combined sales and service efforts of frontline service teams where issues of performance management and goal setting central to achieving high performing teams. Yet, with much of the current literature centred on the processes and outcomes of teamwork and team behaviours, little attention has been paid to the psychological foundations of teams that guide team performance. Thus, this study identifies team-level perceptions of ability (team efficacy) and motivation (team goal orientation) as critical components of retail service team performance and three key questions are addressed: (i) what are the antecedents of team efficacy?; (ii) what is the effect of team goal orientation on sales and service performance?; and (iii) how do the constructs of team efficacy and team goal orientation interact to influence the sales and service performance of retail service teams? This research reviews the retail service team context, social cognitive theory and goal theory to construct a conceptual model of retail service team performance. The model was then tested using data gathered from 13 in-depth interviews and the partial least square analysis of a quantitative survey of 319 retail service teams. Results indicate that integrating performance awareness tasks and promoting team connectedness develops strong efficacy beliefs that positively influence sales and service performance. In addition, the results support the argument for a three-dimensional model of team goal orientation through identifying differing effects of the two performance dimensions on team performance. Theoretically, the most significant contribution of this research is that it offers insight into team-level concepts only previously explored at the individual level of analysis, with the study presenting empirical evidence of team efficacy and team goal orientation as drivers of team performance in the retail services context. Managerial contributions of the research include guidance on how to direct resources towards improving team efficacy and managing team goal orientation to most effectively improve both the sales and service performance of retail service teams.
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(2010)ThesisThis dissertation is primarily concerned with mixture models for high-dimensional financial data. New flexible mixture models are introduced and implemented with fast and effective optimization routines. The stochastic gradient approach uses random gradients to update the parameters of the mixture model improving the chance of the iterates converging to a higher mode. Chapter 2 provides the details of the stochastic gradient optimization routines used. Chapter 3 suggests two new multivariate density estimators, namely the marginal adaptation mixture of normals and the mixture of normals copula. Their performances are compared with a few recent popular models such as the skewed-t model. Chapter 4 discusses covariance estimation for high dimensional data. The aim of the chapter is to improve the estimation of covariance matrices by using mixture shrinkage priors. This chapter also shows how to apply the priors to the simultaneous estimation of several covariance matrices such as in the case of mixture of normals models. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the estimation or fitting of models to time series data, when the models may experience a small number of structural breaks. Chapter 5 looks at univariate data and Chapter 6 considers multivariate data. In particular, Chapter 6 shows how to estimate a Gaussian vector autoregressive model subject to occasional structural breaks using a mixture of experts framework.