Open government policies are spreading across Europe, challenging previous models of the public sector, and defining new forms of relationship between government, citizens, and digital technologies. In their Policy & Internet article “Why Choose Open Government? Motivations for the Adoption of Open Government Policies in Four European Countries,” Emiliana De Blasio and Donatella Selva present […]
Community-based approaches are widely employed in programmes that monitor and promote socioeconomic development. And building the “capacity” of a community — i.e. the ability of people to act individually or collectively to benefit the community — is key to these approaches. The various definitions of community capacity all agree that it comprises a number of […]
Continue reading …There are about 300,000 glaciers worldwide, representing 69% of the world’s fresh water, and a dependable water supply to more than a billion people. Glaciers also provide a key (and very visible) indicator for climate change. Klaus Thymann, a director at Project Pressure — the world’s first crowdsourced archive of glacier images — discusses how photography can provide a unique and important online data resource for climate scientists studying glacial retreat. Launching in 2014, the project’s partners include NASA and the World Glacier Monitoring Service.
Continue reading …Digital communication technologies are altering the interface between policy makers and social movements. Anastasia Kavada, Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, and Guest Editor (with Andrea Calderaro from the European University Institute) of the Special issue on “Online Collective action and Policy Change”, provides an introduction to the papers published in this issue, noting that the internet constitutes both a tool and an object of activism and policymaking.
Continue reading …We talk to Paul Millar, project leader of the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive project about the role of digital humanities in preserving the digital record of the impact of the earthquake that struck Canterbury, NZ, in February 2011. Huge amounts of important information are lost in the chaos following a major disaster: Paul is leading efforts to record and preserve it as a unique resource for future scholarship.
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