Suchergebnisse

As external forces seek to gain influence over ICTs of political parties, their security becomes an additional relevant factor in parties' finances. While many studies focus on parties' online fundraising, their spending for web-based technologies remains terra incognita. Our perspective follows the idea that a party's spending is an indicator for relevance. What aspects are on the table when new ICTs are purchased by parties? What significance do security concerns have? We analyzed the Green Parties in Germany and Austria. Both are forerunners in their use of online participation platforms with decades of experience in engaging members offline. We conducted interviews with stakeholders from both parties and an external IT-specialist. Our findings indicate differences in the approach of securing ICTs even among these most similar cases: some see security as a long-term issue and invest in in-house solutions, others see security as a necessary expense and opt for external service providers.

This paper reports on the findings of the Online-S3 project, funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme (ISSI-4-2015), which tries to address the challenge of strengthening regional smart growth policies by developing an online platform for policy advice. The Online-S3 Platform offers a web- based environment for supporting the design, implementation and assessment of Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) aiming to enrich the methodological framework that is being used towards enhancing smart growth policy design processes in EU regions. The paper first provides an overview of the Online-S3 platform, and then, focuses on the applications that could be used to help regional and national authorities during the priority setting phase of a RIS3 strategic planning process. Given that this phase relates to the identification and selection of specific sectors that can be used as flagships to support regional growth, the Online-S3 Platform offers a great tool towards enhancing the effectiveness of the smart growth paradigm.

Collaborative economy creates new business models in different sectors of the economy and produces new impulses for the development and innovations in the traditional areas. However, to answer the new questions arising from this segment of the economy, we must consider the existing legal framework regarding the central subjects of the collaborative economy - online platforms. In this paper we examine one legal aspect of particular relevance in this regard, specifically the liability of online platforms for content that they host. In particular, we consider the existing liability regime of these platforms, new proposals approved by the European Parliament and we conclude this paper with the critical examination of the liability regime in relation to the push for the adoption of voluntary proactive measures on the EU level.

AbstractOnline platforms provide a technological infrastructure allowing social actors to enact and utilize networks with a global reach. They play important roles as intermediaries and algorithm‐based curators of social interaction. This paper addresses two knowledge gaps: First, while a growing number of empirical studies has deepened our insights into the social dynamics characterizing single platforms, little is known about the multiple ways in which users or user groups combine diverse online offers according to their preferences. Second, the empirical focus has mainly been on online interaction. However, in everyday practices, the online is always situated in offline practices. It is thus necessary to understand the complex interdependencies of online and offline spheres. This paper therefore aims to develop an ecological heuristic that positions the user(s) and their practices center stage in the analysis and to elucidate the on/offline opportunity spaces and the affordances and constraints they provide for user agency.

This study concerns the interactional work involved in the accomplishment of video-mediated homework support and is based on a single case analysis of an instructional encounter between a tutor and an upper-secondary student working together on mathematical assignments. In addition to communicating through video, the participants use an online digital platform that constitutes a shared workspace and interface between the participants, who are situated in geographically disparate locations. A crucial feature of the setting is the unequal distribution of epistemically rich artefacts, such as the maths book, to which the tutee has sole access. Drawing on ethnomethodology and multimodal interaction analysis, the analyses show how the interaction is shaped by and contingent upon the affordances of the online platform and the particular circumstances of the video-mediated setting. The findings reveal how the participants work together to establish shared points of reference from which they embark on collaborative problem-solving trajectories while establishing the problem to be worked upon and its interpretation, as well as negotiating proper presentations of solutions. Additionally, the way in which the participants overcome the interactional and epistemic challenges implicated by the unequal access to crucial epistemic resources is shown.

Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images (and their analysis), but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the following, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web and social media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures.