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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.

Whether you are a university professor, researcher at a think tank, graduate student, or analyst at a private firm, chances are that at some point you have presented your work in front of an audience. Most of us approach this task by converting a written document into slides, but the result is often a text-heavy presentation saddled with bullet points, stock images, and graphs too complex for an audience to decipher—much less understand. Presenting is fundamentally different from writing, and with only a little more time, a little more effort, and a little more planning, you can communicate your work with force and clarity. Designed for presenters of scholarly or data-intensive content, Better Presentations details essential strategies for developing clear, sophisticated, and visually captivating presentations. Following three core principles—visualize, unify, and focus—Better Presentations describes how to visualize data effectively, find and use images appropriately, choose sensible fonts and colors, edit text for powerful delivery, and restructure a written argument for maximum engagement and persuasion. With a range of clear examples for what to do (and what not to do), the practical package offered in Better Presentations shares the best techniques to display work and the best tactics for winning over audiences. It pushes presenters past the frustration and intimidation of the process to more effective, memorable, and persuasive presentations.

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 a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Siegert seeks to re-locate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and non-human, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real, are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting or image-making. The analysis of “media” as cultural techniques emphasizes the practices in which they are embedded, shifting from first-order to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating, to the production of the sign-signal-distinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. All chapters address the fundamental question of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.

The digital economy has great potential, but it also entails risks. The notion of personal property and ownership is under threat because of the shift to digital distribution and ubiquitous embedded software. This book makes a case for the importance of ownership in the digital age. It argues that the rights associated with ownership serve critical functions of promoting cultural preservation and innovation as well as protecting consumer autonomy. Technological developments and the aggressive efforts of IP rights holders, however, are gradually eroding the concept of ownership. There has been a disconcerting trend of courts bypassing the default rules of property law; the rights acquired by consumers through purchase are defined instead by license agreements drafted by IP rights holders or retailers. In addition to license agreements, IP rights holders also employ technological methods such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to restrict consumer use and protect their intellectual property. The matter is made worse by online retailers’ insufficient disclosure, which frequently uses words like “buy” or “own” to offer false promises of ownership. The loss of personal property rights has serious consequence not just for individual consumers; an important institutional actor – the public library – is also struggling to deal with the shift to digital collections and the corresponding restrictions imposed by IP rights holders. In response to these threats to ownership, the book explores legal as well as technological solutions, and presents a powerful argument for informed consumer choice in the digital marketplace.

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.

The burgeoning use and transformative impact of global electronic networks are widely recognized to be defining features of contemporary world affairs. Less often noted has been the increasing importance of global governance arrangements in managing the many issues raised in such networks. This book helps fill the gap by assessing some of the key international institutions pertaining to global telecommunications regulation and standardization, radio frequency spectrum, satellite systems, trade in services, electronic commerce, intellectual property, traditional mass media and Internet content, Internet names and numbers, cybercrime, privacy protection, and development. Eschewing technocratic approaches, the chapter offer empirically rich studies of the international power dynamics shaping these institutions. They devote particular attention to the roles and concerns of non-dominant stakeholders, such as developing countries and civil society, and find that global governance often reinforces wider power disparities between and within nation-states. But at the same time, the chapter note, governance arrangements often provide nondominant stakeholders with the policy space needed to advance their interests more effectively. Each chapter concludes with a set of policy recommendations for the promotion of an open, dynamic, and more equitable networld order.

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.

Missed Information explores three themes about information and modern society: (1) We are neglecting information. Even in our Information Age, we pay more attention to information technology -- the means of storing, moving, protecting information -- than to information itself. "Information" is still the thing we get about other subjects, but rarely is the subject in its own right. (2) Information, on its own, is a powerful agent of change.The old adage, "Information is power", has never been more true. Neglecting information quality can lead to system collapse, as happened in the Soviet Union and came close to happening in the subprime mortgage crisis. (3) Better information and improved information access increases the efficiency of all society's major systems. The benefits of doing so are substantial: more citizen participation, stronger economic performance, better environmental protection and improved government and consumer services. Ultimately, better information allows society's systems to respond more effectively to our collective concerns about global sustainability, such as child labor, climate change, and chemical pollution. The authors examine these themes in depth, not only from the perspective of broad economic, social and technological principles, but with an eye to practical innovations. The book proposes mechanisms for improving information and decision-making in health care, financial reporting, government systems and consumer purchasing, and explores the benefits to be realized once the changes are made.

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 book offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. The book challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, the book argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. It shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public's freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. The book's notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear. Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, the book explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today's press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” the book urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike.

Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. This book examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. Four chapters provide a synoptic overview along with illustrative case studies. The chapter on place describes how digital networks enable us to be present in physical and networked places simultaneously—often at the expense of nondigital commitments. The chapter on culture explores the growth and impact of amateur-produced and remixed content online. The chapter on politics examines the new networked modes of bottom-up political expression and mobilization. And finally, the chapter on infrastructure notes the tension between openness and control in the flow of information, as seen in the current controversy over net neutrality.

The field guide seeks to outline an approach to librarianship, librarians, and libraries based on knowledge, learning, and community engagement. The first part of the book covers the mission, skills, and values of librarians. Librarians are defined as builders of participatory systems to aid communities in making smarter decisions. The second portion of the book outlines libraries as institutions and as platforms for community engagement. The final part of the book outlines methods for teaching New Librarianship concepts including frequently debated points.

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.