Group items tagged

n the IS field there is a growing recognition of the importance of theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context from a pragmatic and action-oriented perspective. Over the years, a number of events and journal special issues have been devoted to this topic (e.g. the Language/Action Perspective workshops 1996-2005 and special issues of CACM and Data and Knowledge Engineering, the Understanding Sociotechnical Action workshops and special issue of IJTHI, the Action in Language, Organizations and Information Systems conferences and EJIS special issue, and the Pragmatic Web conference). The aim of SIGPrag is to provide a much needed centre of gravity and to facilitate exchange of ideas and further development of this area of IS scholarship.

As it tracks and analyzes thought and actions across the world, the Global Power Barometer (GPB) frequently catches sight of issues that will impact global politics. These are the issues that likely will move the icons in coming weeks. We'll share our peeks at the future as they pass certain momentum thresholds. In future days we'll categorize the "Emerging Issues" and provide snippets about the progress of significant trends.

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

The Trade & Environment Database (TED) is a collection of categorical case studies that began with a focus on solely environmental issues, but did not include the economic consequences of other social policy choices, such as culture, rights, or other issues.

Our mission: "Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan primarily pro-con format."

This post would make good fodder for issue mapping

Good potential for an issue mapping exercise

With formal negotiations on the new international climate change treaty due to open in three weeks time, Independent readers are starting to work with the Debategraph community to develop a comprehensive map of the issues around climate change that are confronting the negotiators.

Narrative techniques both provide a complementary form of what we will call pre-hypothesis research, but further that the use of narrative research techniques produces, through a single intervention, quantitative conclusions supported by narrative context, fragmented knowledge databases, and a mechanism for measuring impact and more complex issues such as mapping ideation cultures.

Snowden again... Looks like a fairly interesting book is on its way, as well...?

This paper addresses the issue of text normalization, an important yet often overlooked problem in natural language processing. By text normalization, we mean converting 'informally inputted' text into the canonical form, by eliminating 'noises' in the text and detecting paragraph and sentence boundaries in the text.

Invariant study is fundamental to any scientific research, especially when the research domain is as complex as World Wide Web. Invariants are supposed to be constant within the specified research scope. By well understanding the invariants we may effectively improve the knowledge over many complicated issues. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly for us to see the discussion of invariant study in the new Web Science Research Initiative.

Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting.

Dialogue, Argument and Deliberation on Earth Issues

Action research is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a "community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and solve problems. Action research can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice.

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.

X-Media addresses the issue of knowledge management in complex distributed environments. It will study, develop and implement large scale methodologies and techniques for knowledge management able to support sharing and reuse of knowledge that is distributed in different media (images, documents and data) and repositories (data bases, knowledge bases, document repositories, etc.). The project started in March 2006 and will last for 4 years. It has a budget topping Euro 13.6M, (9.9M from the EU). 15 partners are involved from UK, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia, Greece and Norway.

S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action has been one of the course's handbooks for a memorable number of years already, but the manner in which it has been used has changed somewhat over the years. Although the basic concern of the book is with «informal» semantics (not the formal brand of semantics concerned with, e.g. the computation of truth-value), i.e. the «symbolic» way in which utterances are used to convey meaning, it also raises the more cognitive issue of how language affects human thought and conditions behaviour, and addresses the resulting «ethical» question of how language should be used to achieve cooperation and understanding rather than confrontation and conflict. These questions (though viewed in a somewhat «optimistic» perspective) give the book additional value as one of the pioneering works in «critical linguistics», a discipline which was to develop only much later.

Welcome to the Netroots Nation question submission page for the Saturday morning (July 19, 9:00am) keynote session "Ask The Speaker." The event empowers citizens to engage America's current House Speaker in substantive discussion about current issues, the legislative process, and how citizens can participate in their government. Instead of simply giving a speech at a podium, Speaker Pelosi will be taking your questions and interacting with convention attendees. The 9 a.m. keynote will be moderated by Gina Cooper, Netroots Nation's Executive Director, and Jeffrey Feldman, author and blogger. But it all begins right now, right here, when you submit your questions and vote on questions submitted by others.

She suggested that we used the communication metaphor too much, assuming that all issues were either about listening or telling. Instead she argued we needed an interaction metaphor in which we communicate by action and more importantly interaction. Praxis makes perfect as we used to say. There is a fair amount of talk about story-listening and story-telling and much of it is useful. However, interaction is about collaborative story creation, something which I think has more inherent value.

As computers and computer networks become more sophisticated, a huge amount of information, such as that found in Web documents, has been accumulated and circulated. Such information gives people a framework for organizing their daily lives. A well-functioning society needs technology that can be used to manage this wealth of information and, in particular, investigate its credibility. This technology would be able to handle a wide range of tasks: extracting credible information related to a given topic, organizing this information, detecting its provenance, clarifying background, facts, and various related opinions and the distribution of them, and so on. Especially, as the Web is becoming a major source of information nowadays, it is necessary to provide efficient and reliable methods for evaluation of Web content's trustworthiness. The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion on issues related to information credibility criteria and the process of its evaluation.

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).