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This document contains a summary of the results and scope of the WADcher project addressed to the general public. The project addresses the challenges people with various degrees of disabilities face when accessing mainstream online products and services, thus being excluded from benefiting from Web content and services on an equal basis as people without disabilities. Marginalising people with disabilities on this level is a critical and problematic issue, especially in today's "Information Society", where access to information should be equally available to all. While these challenges have been identified (also by the EC with the published Web Accessibility Directive (WAD), which entered into force on 22/12/2016), they have not yet been addressed efficiently. In this context and building on ongoing tools, WADcher researched, developed and demonstrated a set of innovative frameworks: an Observatory, a Decision Support Environment (DSE) and a Monitor Service, for large scale hybrid web accessibility assessment services and WAD compliance by implementing the monitoring, reporting and enforcement procedures of the WAD in all European public sector websites, while minimising costs and development-time along with increased scalability, accessibility and usability for all stakeholders, to enable "Web Access by Default".

Between 2014 and 2017 the E-ARK project brought together a consortium of five European national archives, five leading research institutions, three systems providers, two government institutions, and two membership organisations to work on the development and implementation of the tools, standards, and administrative processes required to support digital archiving. The project exceeded its objectives and achieved significant results in numerous areas. In particular, it met all ten milestones; produced all 31 deliverables (plus some extra) http://www.eark-project.com/resources/project-deliverables ; was assessed as excellent in the final year review; and was dubbed a "European Showcase Project" by the Project Officer, Alina Senn, together with the two external project reviewers Adrian Brown (Parliamentary Archives, UK), and Hannes Kulovits, (Austrian National Archives)[1]. Finally, robust measures were adopted to sustain the project outputs, which are now listed by category.

The introduction of a distributed authentication and authorisation environment (eg using Shibboleth), creates a new requirement for mechanisms that support feedback on the confidence level of the authentication process. Some resources may be considered more valuable or sensitive than others thus require greater levels of assurance (LoA) that the person or process attempting to gain access is really who or what they purport to be. Standard mechanisms need to be defined and agreed to enable this information to be exchanged securely and with confidence in a wide variety of environments. The e-Infrastructure Security: Levels of Assurance project (ES-LoA) has investigated current definitions of LoA emerging in the UK at government level, and internationally. It has also surveyed potential users of LoA technology, both identity providers (such as universities, colleges) who have to register people to permit access to services, and service providers (including commercial and JISC-funded services).

This project concerns the management of especially risky and uncertain forms of innovation. More precisely, it concentrates on architectural or radical innovations which by their nature challenge existing technological conventions, regulatory frameworks, and established relations between consumers and producers. Public and private sector managers of research and development projects have ready access to a range of tools and techniques with which to inform and evaluate decisions about the relative merits of competing projects and proposals. The trouble is that conventional management methods assume the stability of technological, regulatory and market environments. As a result, they are of limited value when these dimensions are uncertain. The core problem is this: what can managers do to enhance societal robustness (and hence the chances of social and political success) when dealing with "architectural" innovation. In response, we devised a feasibility study through which to develop and test a new kit of tools for use in such situations. The tool kit, informed by literature reviews in the sociology of innovation, evolutionary economics, and management and organisational science, helps managers better understand the history and present positioning of their project and determine appropriate next steps to promote and enhance its social viability. Still in the early stages of development, the SOCROBUST tool kit has been prepared for use in a consultancy style interaction involving two parties: a SOCROBUST assessor and the project manager. It consists of four steps and ten tools, many of which have been designed from scratch. The basic sequence is as follows. The initial step is to describe the project from different angles: first a narrative of events to date; second a mapping of the cast of actors currently implicated in the project; and third a detailing of key events or turning points along the way. Having established a picture of the past, the next challenge is to imagine and describe a future world in which the project has succeeded and its goals have been achieved. This future working world is represented in different ways: via a revised mapping of the actors who will be involved and a more precise specification of anticipated relations between them. The second step is to look back over this descriptive material and identify the key changes which will have to take place if the gap between the present and the future working world is to be closed. The third step homes in on these key changes but from a new perspective. The purpose here is to put the key changes in context, to check on their viability given events in the world beyond the project, and to thereby assess and evaluate the project s present positioning and the key assumptions on which it depends. Having made this assessment, the final step is one of identifying plausible and relevant next steps and of identifying those on which the project manager can act. This method has been tested on five on-going cases. In all of these it proved to be of practical value for the project managers involved, leading some to revise their views of the project in question and inspiring others to take different actions as a result. Organised as a method for periodically checking, assessing and evaluating societal robustness, SOCROBUST offers a way of managing what have hitherto been inherently unmanageable processes of uncertain innovation. The feasibility study has demonstrated what promises to be of the lasting value of the SOCROBUST approach. Further work is required to explore the possibility of producing a self-administered version — that is of designing a SOCROBUST process which project managers could follow on their own — and of testing the method on a complete portfolio of current projects.

This article is the final report generated by the participants in the 105th American Assembly on "US-Canada Relations" at Arden House in Harriman, NY, February 3-6, 2005. The introduction outlines the changing circumstances in which the binational relationship has recently found itself: the end of the Cold War has changed the international position of both countries, while the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have dramatically refocused the priorities of the US. Meanwhile, Canada faces daunting problems, including a reduced influence on the world stage. The article also addresses political tensions between the two nations; the notion that Canadian & US values are fundamentally different (that idea is challenged here); & matters of defense & security. Worries are voiced concerning the apparent growth of anti-American sentiment in Canada. Regarding defense & security, it is suggested that the time for strengthening binational cooperation is here, & that this cooperation must involve greater Canadian defense expenditures as well as a resolution to differences over ballistic missile defense strategies. Also discussed are cross-border trade & energy resource collaboration. A list of the assembly's major findings concludes the paper. T. K. Brown