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Government agencies and public organizations often consider adopting open source software (OSS) for reasons of transparency, cost, citizen access, and greater efficiency in communication and delivering services. This book offers five real-world case studies of OSS adoption by public organizations. The authors analyze the cases and develop an overarching, conceptual framework to clarify the various enablers and inhibitors of OSS adoption in the public sector. The book provides a resource for policymakers, practitioners, and academics. The five cases of OSS adoption include a hospital in Ireland; an IT consortium serving all the municipalities of the province of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; schools and public offices in the Extremadura region of Spain; the Massachusetts state government's open standards policy in the United States; and the ICT department of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The book provides a comparative analysis of these cases around the issues of motivation, strategies, technologies, economic and social aspects, and the implications for theory and practice.

In this book, the world's foremost cyber security experts share critical practical knowledge on how the cyberspace ecosystem is structured, how it functions, and what we can do to protect it and ourselves from attack and exploitation. It collects the wisdom of cyber security professionals and practitioners from government, academia, and industry across national and international boundaries. It provides readers with the information they need to secure and sustain the cyberspace ecosystem and to defend themselves against all kinds of adversaries and attacks. It provides critical intelligence on cyber crime and security—including details of real-life operations. Among the many important topics it covers are: building a secure cyberspace ecosystem; public-private partnerships to secure cyberspace; law enforcement to protect cyber citizens and to safeguard cyber infrastructure; and strategy and policy issues relating to the security of the cyberecosystem.

This volume not only examines traditional questions about broadband, such as availability and access, but also explores and evaluates new metrics that are more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access. It brings together a group of media policy scholars from a wide range of disciplines including economics, law, policy studies, computer science, information science, and communications studies. It asks questions such as: After broadband access, what next? What role do metrics play in understanding information societies and, more important, in shaping their policies? Beyond counting people with broadband access, how can economic and social metrics inform broadband policies, help evaluate their outcomes, and create useful models for achieving national goals? Importantly, the book provides a well-rounded, international perspective on theoretical approaches to communications policymaking in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Showcasing a diversity of approaches, this collection aims to help meet the myriad challenges involved in improving the development of communications policy around the world.

The gradual disappearance of paper and its familiar evidential qualities affects almost every dimension of contemporary life. From health records to ballots, almost all documents are now digitized at some point of their life cycle, easily copied, altered, and distributed. This book examines the challenge of defining a new evidentiary framework for electronic documents, focusing on the design of a digital equivalent to handwritten signatures. From the blackboards of mathematicians to the halls of legislative assemblies, the book traces the path of such an equivalent: digital signatures based on the mathematics of public-key cryptography. In the mid-1990s, cryptographic signatures formed the centerpiece of a worldwide wave of legal reform and of an ambitious cryptographic research agenda that sought to build privacy, anonymity, and accountability into the very infrastructure of the Internet. Yet markets for cryptographic products collapsed in the aftermath of the dot-com boom and bust along with cryptography’s social projects. The book describes the trials of French bureaucracies as they wrestled with the application of electronic signatures to real estate contracts, birth certificates, and land titles, and tracks the convoluted paths through which electronic documents acquire moral authority. These paths suggest that the material world need not merely succumb to the virtual but, rather, can usefully inspire it. Indeed, the book argues, in renewing their engagement with the material world, cryptographers might also find the key to broader acceptance of their design goals.

This is a book about the computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the people who made it possible. Unlike most histories of computing, it is not a book about machines, inventors, or entrepreneurs. Instead, the book tells the story of the vast but largely anonymous legions of computer specialists—programmers, systems analysts, and other software developers—who transformed the electronic computer from a scientific curiosity into the defining technology of the modern era. As the systems that they built became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, these specialists became the focus of a series of critiques of the social and organizational impact of electronic computing. To many of their contemporaries, it seemed the “computer boys” were taking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society in general. This book traces the rise to power of the computer expert in modern American society. Its portrayal of the men and women (a surprising number of the “computer boys” were, in fact, female) who built their careers around the novel technology of electronic computing explores issues of power, identity and expertise that have only become more significant in our increasingly computerized society. In a recasting of the drama of the computer revolution through the eyes of its principle revolutionaries, the book reminds us that the computerization of modern society was not an inevitable process driven by impersonal technological or economic imperatives, but was rather a creative, contentious, and above all, fundamentally human development.

In this witty and openly polemical critique of Google, Barbara Cassin looks at Google’s claims to organize knowledge, and its alleged ethical basis, through a reading of its two founding principles: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information” and “Don’t be evil”. Cassin is a formidable Hellenist by training, and in Google-Me she uses her profound knowledge of Greek culture, philology and philosophy (and of the history of philosophy more broadly) to challenge the basis on which Google makes its claims and the manner in which it carries out its operations. The perspective it presents on Google is anything but drily philological, densely philosophical, or academic in its tone, but it offers us an entertaining account of its origins and history up until 2007. We would all be well-advised to take this critique seriously, since it goes to the heart of what we often think of rather uncritically as the benefits to humanity of increasingly advanced internet technology. As Cassin puts it toward the end, “Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” Published originally in French in 2007, Cassin’s book is translated into English for the first time by Michael Syrotinski, and includes a co-authored and updated afterword by Cassin and Syrotinski.

Human information interaction (HII) is an emerging area of study that investigates how people interact with information; its subfield human information behavior (HIB) is a flourishing, active discipline. Yet despite their obvious relevance to the design of information systems, these research areas have had almost no impact on systems design. One issue may be the contextual complexity of human interaction with information; another may be the difficulty in translating real-life and unstructured HII complexity into formal, linear structures necessary for systems design. This book proposes a research approach that bridges the study of human information interaction and the design of information systems: cognitive work analysis (CWA). Developed by Jens Rasmussen and his colleagues, CWA embraces complexity and provides a conceptual framework and analytical tools that can harness it to create design requirements. It offers an ecological approach to design, analyzing the forces in the environment that shape human interaction with information. The book reviews research in HIB, focusing on its contribution to systems design, and then presents the CWA framework. It shows that CWA, with its ecological approach, can be used to overcome design challenges and lead to the development of effective systems. Researchers and designers who use CWA can increase the diversity of their analytical tools, providing them with an alternative approach when they plan research and design projects. The CWA framework enables a collaboration between design and HII that can create information systems tailored to fit human lives.

Information retrieval in the age of Internet search engines has become part of ordinary discourse and everyday practice: “Google” is a verb in common usage. Thus far, more attention has been given to practical understanding of information retrieval than to a full theoretical account. This book offers a comprehensive overview of information retrieval, synthesizing theories from different disciplines (information and computer science, librarianship and indexing, and information society discourse) and incorporating such disparate systems as WorldCat and Google into a single theoretical framework. There is a need for such a theoretical treatment, it argues, one that reveals the structure and underlying patterns of this complex field while remaining congruent with everyday practice. The book presents a labor theoretic approach to information retrieval, building on previously formulated distinction between semantic and syntactic mental labor, arguing that the description and search labor of information retrieval can be understood as both semantic and syntactic in character. This information science approach is rooted in the humanities and the social sciences but informed by an understanding of information technology and information theory. The chapters offer a progressive exposition of the topic, with illustrative examples to explain the concepts presented.

We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity. This book investigates an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. The book examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years. The chapters present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering, and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

The use of open-source software (OSS)—readable software source code that can be copied, modified, and distributed freely—has expanded dramatically in recent years. The number of OSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net (the largest hosting Web site for OSS), for example, grew from just over 100,000 in 2006 to more than 250,000 at the beginning of 2011. But why are some projects successful—that is, able to produce usable software and sustain ongoing development over time—while others are abandoned? This book, the product of a large-scale empirical study to look at social, technical, and institutional aspects of OSS, examines factors that lead to success in OSS projects and work toward a better understanding of Internet-based collaboration. Drawing on literature from many disciplines and using a theoretical framework developed for the study of environmental commons, it examines stages of OSS development, presenting multivariate statistical models of success and abandonment. The authors argue that analyzing the conditions of OSS successes may also inform Internet collaborations in fields beyond software engineering, particularly those which aim to solve complex technical, social, and political problems.

The field notes taken for this book are not only about nature, but from nature as well. The book lets the reader peer over the author'shoulder as he takes his notes. The reader follows him to a series of field stations where he teams up with scientists, citizen scientists, rangers, stewards, and graduate students engaged in long-term ecological study, all the while scribbling down what he sees, hears, and feels in the moment. The field stations are located at Hastings Natural History Reservation, studying acorn woodpeckers; Santa Cruz Island Reserve, studying island foxes; Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, hawkwatching; H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, recording a forest log for two weeks through the Spring Creek Project; and North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, which was built as mitigation for the environmental harm caused by the hydroelectric dam. The book explores how communal experiences of nature might ultimately provide greater depths of appreciation for the natural world.

This is a book about obfuscation: the production of noise modeled on an existing signal in order to make a collection of data more ambiguous, confusing, harder to exploit, more difficult to act on, and therefore less valuable. It is a tool for defending and expanding digital privacy against data surveillance, and protesting the unjust collection or misuse of data. The authors provide strategies and an argument for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage, particularly for average users not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about themselves. Obfuscation also has applications for groups -- from software developers to policymakers -- who want to collect and apply data without the possibility of its future misuse. The book offers many examples, case histories, and arguments about the nature, function, and promise of obfuscation: why it is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

Horse racing has played a significant role in the development and use of new media technologies and media spaces. With the beginning of modern horse racing in the nineteenth century, racetracks became leisure destinations, with physical spaces that structured and were structured by social and cultural practices. By the late 1800s, in the days before theme parks, tracks served as vacation sites. The invention of an early computer, the totalizator, at the turn of the twentieth century allowed horse racing to help usher in the information age. The totalizator made pari-mutuel wagering, in which race odds are determined by the bets of participants in a gambling market, manageable. It also enabled near-instantaneous data processing of bets and posting of odds, and it facilitated networks that linked live racing with remote sites: from telegraph-connected “pool rooms” to late twentieth-century off-track betting facilities (OTBs). OTBs pioneered the use of non-ambient public screens, and the arrangement of social space around public screens. Interactive television and the Internet have moved participation in online pari-mutuel markets from public to private space, highlighting and challenging the traditional divide between public and domestic sphere. In addition, fans of racehorses use social media to share the products of their uncompensated and femininely-gendered labor, from fan videos to real-time information needed to rescue former racehorses. Indeed, throughout its modern history, the practices of horse racing have underscored the roles played by gender, race, and class in technology use.

In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (which shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. This book investigates choices such as these made by high-tech workers in New York City’s “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs—investing time, energy, and other personal resources that the author terms “venture labor”—when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? The author argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, the author finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments which support workers.