28th Dec2011

Response to the Open Public Services White Paper

by admin

The UK Government has Published its White Paper on Open Public Services. Their priorities are:

  • Choice – wherever possible we will increase choice
  • Decentralisation – Power should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate level
  • Diversity – Public services should be open to a range of providers
    Fairness – We will ensure fair access to public services
  • Accountability – Public services should be accountable to users and taxpayers.

Crocels has responded to it in depth as you can see at the bottom of this post. We suggest that the following questions need to be answered in response to it. Comments are welcomed from visitors to this site by using the form below.

Enabling the Big Society

1. The White Paper asks about empowering public sector staff to take control of their own services in new enterprises like mutuals. Equally, how can the skills of members of the public be raised so that they may be emancipated from the controlling state, where they may have a voice at the ballot box, but have little choice in the decisions made for them?

2. The White Paper envisages actively encouraging new providers, of all sizes and from all sectors, to deliver public services. How can those elected representatives who believe in the means of production, distribution and exchange being in the hands of the State and imposed by democratically elected governments, be transitioned to a people-led society where government plays a smaller role than at present?

Changing Models of Enforcement

3. The White Paper says the Government wants to involve independent champions like Which in open public services. Crocels agrees with this in principle and ask: Would a body like this make a better job of enforcing trading standards than local authorities?

Education

4. The White Paper speaks about school and university admissions. Would it be fairer if the top 5% of students at every school, regardless of the marks of the candidate get given an A* grade? This could mean those from disadvantaged areas could meet admission criteria for elite universities even though there is still work to do in improving local provision.

5. The White Paper speaks about the English Baccalaureate. Would it not be better to have a system similar to Bologna to harmonise qualifications across the EU while using Europass Mobility to explain local curricula?

6. The White Paper speaks about the Pupil Premium and school funding. Could the Pupil Premium be used to allow greater choice and mobility of pupils beyond catchment areas, such as on the basis of the successful Assisted Places Scheme?

7. The White Paper speaks about improving school funding arrangements. As in the previous paragraph, could this be done of the basis of choice so the funding goes directly to schools picked by the students parents and by-passing the local authorities?

Healthcare and Disability

8. The White paper talks about various health funding schemes such as for sufferers of chronic health conditions, adult social care, and support for special educational needs (SEN) and disability. Would it not be best if these various pots of money were given to the persons preferred P4+choice service provider, for example Bupa/AXA/etc. in the case of healthcare, or charities like the NAS for people with autism or RNIB for people who are blind, who are currently financed from Direct Payments?

Economic Models

9. What changes need to be made to economic models based on financial capital so that they take account of the “mass-collaboration” drive of the Big Society, where volunteers and involunteers’ give or are made to give their time often only being exposed to opportunity cost.

10. Could the ‘P4+contingent’ model be the mandatory option for those out of work? Could this mean they will always be available for work should they be needed to cover for people who have withheld their labour?

Law Enforcement

11. Would a P4+gov body as the enforcer against everyday trespasses, like drunk and disorderly behaviour and other anti-social offences using P4+self ‘contingent workers’ be more cost effective than the current employee-based policing structure?

12. Will this proposed localised non-criminal resolution of trespasses, where something is a crime if the person feels ‘bleasured’ and this is found to be proven through ‘actus reus’ and ‘malum reus’ more quickly resolve ‘crime’ than the current system?

13. Would a protracted dualist judicial process discourage vexatious claims and reduce the likelihood of ‘ambulance chasers’ trying to make a quick profit?

14. Would removing police from day-to-day trespasses, where they stand likely to lose their jobs is crime is reduced, and replacing them with charities who have an interest in the victim, and insurance companies worried about their bottom line be more likely to lead to the resolution of ‘crimes’?

Cross-border use of welfare and tax and law enforcement

15. Does it make sense that National Insurance be used to fund health-care and social services support for UK Citizens wherever in the EU they are?

16. Would having a welfare system modelled on the ‘student loan’ system mean that other EU Nationals would have to pay back the ‘benefit payments’ they claimed in the UK when they go back home or anywhere else in the world?

17. Would having cross-border IT systems which flag-up registered offenders when they approach risk-areas, make it easier for EU Citizens to self-enforce the law through people-sector organisations like Neighbourhood Watch or other P4+gov initiatives?

18. Would EU-wide private-sector provided systems like Google Latitude make it easier for EU citizens to intercept property stolen from other EU citizens?

Detailed Response on Scribd

Crocels’s Reponse to Government White Paper on Open Public Services – Towards a P4 Mixed Economy

Your Point of View

If you have answers to the questions above or any other views please make them in the reply form below

Category : Consultations
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

Road Testing social networking services for e-dating

by jonathanbishop

Online dating services driven by subscriptions usually offer the least amount of social networking opportunities, as they often only utilise the personal homepage genre of online community, which only makes them effective for the bonding and encoding stage of the relationship. The dating services modelled on the free-at-the-point-of-use model scored much higher as many of them utilized the Circle of Friends social networking method and a wider number of online community genres.

The most effective dating service, as can be seen from Table 1, is Facebook, which uses the personal homepage genre, the message board genre, the weblog and directory genre, as well as utilising the Circle of Friends. The second highest scoring, Second Life, utilises virtual worlds, message boards, chat groups and profile pages to allow people to contact in a three-dimensional environment. The popularity of Facebook with its widespread use and its high score based on these guidelines suggest that the guidelines may be appropriate for evaluating the appropriateness of a social networking service for dating. Being able to predict outcomes is one of the possible uses of a case study like the one in this chapter, and the above model and guidelines appear to be indicative of what will make a good e-dating service.

Dating Service Score
Facebook 2.00
Second Life 1.83
Badoo 1.67
MySpace 1.67
Friendster 1.67
OkCupid 1.50
Plenty of Fish 1.17
FreeDating.co.uk 1.17
Bebo 1.00
Meetic 0.83
Match.com 0.83
LoopyLove 0.83

Table 1. Scores of Major Dating Services

eDating Services are becoming a mainstream business with vendors keen to protect their reputation. Traditional online dating websites that follow the Directory structure of e-commerce sites like Amazon such as Match.com and Meetic were the lowest scoring in the study, and these sites seem not to follow the model in Figure 2 as they treat participants as products to view rather than individuals to network with as MySpace and Facebook allow.

Recommendation: Utilise various genres of online community

Many authors of guidelines to building online communities have indirectly recommended using multiple models of online communities. A website meeting the definition of an online community based on Amy Jo Kim’s lifecycle could utilize more than one genre. As identified in the study above, a website is more able to assist with social networking and relationship building if it uses a variety of different models of discussion and networking at the different stages of the lifecycle.

Recommendation: Utilize the Circle of Friends social networking tool, or at minimum allow people to keep lists of actual or potential friends.

The ECF clearly places the actor in the environment, and the relationship between actors is clearly important. Many social network service providers have used the Circle of Friends to allow their actors using their service to manage their the relationships with others effectively. The Circle of Friends, which was popularized by Friendster, allows actors to see not only their own friends as they could with instant messaging tools, but also allow them to see who their friend’s friends are. As a social networking technology, the Circle of Friends fits into a long history of using the Internet as an environment for developing relationships and increasing sociability.

The first social networking service on the Web was Classmates.com, which launched in 1995 and used the Old School Tie social networking method, which is defined as a method for building networks of users using the schools and universities they graduated from. This was followed in 1997 with the launch of SixDegrees.com, which utilized the Web of Contacts model, which is defined as a technique for displaying social networks using social networking analysis that the user doesn’t manage it. The advantage of the Circle of Friends, which was developed in 1999 as part of the Virtual Environments for Community and Commerce (VECC) Project is that it allows the user to manage their network and decide who they want to be friends with. The 2001 implementation of the Circle of Friends as part of Llantrisant.com allowed users to classify their friends according to whether they trusted them or not, combining it with the Circle of Trust that was also developed in 1999. The Circle of Friends flourished in 2002 with the launch of Friendster, and is now part of many other communities including the popular MySpace and Facebook services.

Recommendation: Utilise a recommendation or search system that encourages people to interact with others with similar cognitions to them

As the Ecological Cognition Framework clearly suggests, a stimulus, such as a thought to do something or a request from another actor can only be turned into a response after an actor’s cognitions, that is their goals, plans, values, beliefs and interests have been activated and evaluated. Social networking sites can help in this process by removing the obstacles to actors interacting with others. One method for doing this is to use recommender systems, which have been used in e-commerce to reduce the number of products from the whole catalogue to ones that the customer would be interested in (Wang, 2004). Online dating services could utilize such systems to narrow down the number of individuals available to an actor in line with what they are looking for. This could be done using personality-based questionnaires as is done with OkCupid, personal characteristics, as is done with Match.com or keyword searches as Match.com and MySpace use.

Such systems may allow actors to be engaged in a state of ‘flow’ so much so that they experience ‘deference’. A a state of flow is being the state of mind where an actor will act with total involvement narrowing their attention focus and experiencing a loss of self-consciousness. If an online community does not create discomfort in the actor’s mind, or ‘dissonance’, then the actor is more likely to become engaged in a state of flow and act out their desires, thus experiencing deference. Deference in this context is where an actor will receive a request to do something, such as someone asking them how they are and will respond immediately without any discomfort, in the example immediately saying they are ‘fine’ as if it is a reflex.

Whilst engaging an actor in a state of flow might mean that they are more likely to experience deference and act out their desires to be social, there is also the possibility that they will act out their vengeance desires as well. This may be true as some studies have indicated that in virtual environments where actors are likely to experience deference they are more likely to flame others.

More information
More information on this topic can be found in our research paper on social networking in online dating services.

Category : Op-Eds
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

Defining the cyberspace constitution

by jonathanbishop

At the dawn of the Worldwide Web when there was a heating up of imposition of laws by nation states on the international communications networks, one isolated voice spoke out and was cross-posted more times than the author could imagine. In March 1999, the strategy for regulating government exploitation of the Internet in the UK was set out for the first time in the Modernising Government White Paper.

Until late 2005 the focus of policy development in respect of interactive and transactional services online had been based upon consideration of how to drive up access and demand. However, government intervention with regard to the Internet has to some people been unwanted, as was voiced quiet vehemently by John Perry Barlow in his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. He openly declared in this document, ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’

This text is now one of the cornerstones in the history of the Internet. Barlow’s concept of cyberspace as a homeland without and beyond frontiers is somewhat challenging to the concept of a nation state put forward by Adam Smith but perhaps more consistent with the view of a nation as an ‘imagined community’ put forward by Benedict Anderson.

Barlow’s separation between the virtual world and the “real world” has been overturned by legislation and legal cases as soon as analysts began to worry about “spillover” from problems in cyberspace to problems in the real world. However, as Manjikian suggests, the legal and political systems are only one part of the story. Legitimate questions on the authority of websites in Cyberspace and its users as opposed to whether it can be considered a sovereign body can still be asked.

Cyberspace may still exist as a cultural society, where its users share the same technologies and share similar networks of mental artefacts, such as beliefs, values and experiences. A question that must be asked is whether Barlow’s document could be considered a constitution for the Internet. If so what impact does it have on the way we think about the constitutional and administrative laws that make up ‘the British Constitution’.

Definitions abound as to what a constitution is. It has been pointed out that a source that can be used to find information on such a definition would be the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a California-based online community (Rheingold, 2000). It has also been argued that our current understanding of what a constitution is largely depends on the constructions which nineteenth-century constitutionalism placed upon it, locking the constitution into a series of complex relationships with liberal views of the modern nation state.

A current understanding of constitution is that it is a set of principles which determine the way a country will be governed, and a description of the order in which the principles should be invoked. Others have defined a constitution as something to which people subscribe to which sets out rules they agree to abide by. Based on these definitions, John Perry Barlow’s document could be considered a constitution for the Internet as it was at one point cross-posted by 40,000 websites who accepted the ethos of an ungoverned community called Cyberspace driven by a distinct order of statelessness.

However, a constitution is not only a repository of values, it also has considerable legal and political consequences. From this it can be seen that the United Kingdom’s constitution, while not written, has a structure of institutions governed by a set of shared economic and legal frameworks subscribed to by all those subjects who are deemed British citizens. This suggests that while Barlow’s document serves as a symbol of Internet users’ wish to be untouched by State-like institutions and legal rules, the unwritten British constitution has shown there is more meaning to the term than a document that prescribes a set of common values and beliefs. Indeed, it has been argued that the British constitution is at a critical historical, political and institutional juncture in which a number of inter-linked emerging agendas are altering the relationship between parliament and the executive. A constitution could perhaps therefore be defined as ‘a common agreement between a network of actors as to how they agree to co-exist as a society’.

More information

Further information can be found in our research paper comparing the Cyberspace constitution with the UK constitution.

Category : Op-Eds
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

The role of the vendor in consumer-orientated online communities

by jonathanbishop

The rise of online communities has set in motion an unprecedented power shift from goods and services vendors to customers. Vendors who understand this power transfer and choose to capitalise on it are richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns they argue In contemporary business discourse, online community is no longer seen as an impediment to online commerce, nor is it considered just a useful website add-on or a synonym for interactive marketing strategies.

Rather, online communities are frequently central to the commercial development of the Internet, and to the imagined future of narrowcasting and mass customization in the wider world of marketing and advertising. Online communities offer vendors an unparalleled opportunity to really get to know their customers and to offer customized goods and services in a cost executive way and it is this recognition of an individual’s needs that creates lasting customer loyalty. Needs are not the only cognitive element that affects an actor’s behavior, then vendors that want to use online communities to reach their customers will benefit from taking account of the knowledge, skills and social networks of their customers as well.

It is possible to effectively create an online community at a click of a button as tools such as Yahoo! Groups, Facebook and Google+ allow the casual Internet user to create a space on the Net for people to talk about a specific topic or Interest. Online communities can be defined according to the forms they take. These forms range from special interest discussion websites to instant messaging groups. A social definition could include the requirement that an information system’s users go through the Membership Lifecycle identified by Amy Jo Kim.

Kim’s lifecycle proposed that individual online community members would enter each community as visitors, or “Lurkers.” After breaking through a barrier they would become “Novices,” and settle in to community life. If they regularly post content, they become “Regulars.” Next, they become “Leaders,” and if they serve in the community for a considerable amount of time, they become “Elders.”

Primary online community genres based on this definition are easily identified by the technology platforms on which they are based. Using this definition, it is possible to see the personal homepage as an online community since users must go through the membership lifecycle in order to post messages to a ‘guestbook’ or join a ‘Circle of Friends’.

The Circle of Friends method of networking, developed as part of the VECC Project has been embedded in social networking sites, some of which meet the above definition of an online community. One of the most popular genres of online community is the bulletin board, also known as a message board. A message board is one of the most familiar genres of online gathering place, which is asynchronous, meaning people do not have to be in the same place at the same time to have a conversation.

An alternative to the message board is the email list, which is the easiest kind of online gathering place to create, maintain and in which to participate. Another genre of online community that facilitates discussion is the Chat Group, where people can chat synchronously, communicating in the same place at the same time.

Two relatively new types of online community are the Weblog and the Wiki. Weblogs, or blogs. These are websites that comprise hyperlinks to articles, news releases, discussions and comments that vary in length and are presented in chronological order. The community element of this technology commences when the owner, referred to as a ‘blogger’, invites others to comment on what he/she has written. A Wiki, which is so named through taking the first letters from the axiom, ‘what I know is;’ is a collaborative page-editing tool with which users may add or edit content directly through their web browser.

Despite their newness, Wikis could be augmented with older models of hypertext system. A genre of online community that has existed for a long time, but is also becoming increasingly popular is the Virtual World, which may be a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORG) or some other 3D virtual environment, such as World of Warcraft.

Genre

Advantages/Disadvantages

Personal Homepage

Advantages: Regularly updated, allows
people to re-connect by leaving messages and joining circle of friends

Disadvantage: Members often need to
re-register for each site and cannot usually take their ‘Circle of Friends’
with them.

Message Boards

Advantages: Posts can be accessed at any time. Easy
to ignore undesirable content.

Disadvantages: Threads can be very long and reading
them time consuming

Email Lists and Newsletters

Advantages: Allows a user to receive a message as
soon as it is sent

Disadvantages: Message archives not always
accessible.

Chat Groups

Advantages: Synchronous. Users can communicate in
real-time.

Disadvantages: Posts can be sent simultaneously and
the user can become lost in the conversation.

Virtual Worlds and Simulations

Advantages: 3D metaphors enable heightened community
involvement

Disadvantages: Requires certain hardware and
software that not all users have

Weblogs and Directories

Advantages: Easily updated, regular content

Disadvantages: Members can’t start topics, only
respond to them

Wikis and Hypertext Fiction

Advantages: Can allow for collaborative work on
literary projects

Disadvantages: Can bring out the worst in people,
e.g. their destructive natures

More information

For more information on this topic you can read our researcher papers on increasing revenue using avatars and characters and genres of online communities.

Category : Op-Eds
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

Increasing Capital Revenue in Social Networking Communities: Building Social and Economic Relationships through Avatars and Characters

by jonathanbishop

Bishop, J. (2011b) ‘Increasing Capital Revenue in Social Networking Communities: Building Social and Economic Relationships through Avatars and Characters‘. In: IRMA (ed.). Virtual Communities: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications. IGI Global: New York, NY, pp. 1720-1737.

Category : Publications
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

Enhancing the understanding of genres of web-based communities: the role of the ecological cognition framework

by jonathanbishop

Bishop, J. (2009) “Enhancing the understanding of genres of web-based communities: the role of the ecological cognition framework”, International Journal of Web Based Communities, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 4-17.

Category : Publications
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

Transformations in Online Communities: From Lurker to Poster

by jonathanbishop

Bishop, J. (2011) ‘Transformations in Online Communities: From Lurker to Poster’. In: Postgraduate interdisciplinary conference on Transformations. Cardiff, UK: Cardiff University Press.

Category : Publications
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

All’s WELL that Ends WELL: A Comparative Analysis of the Constitutional and Administrative Frameworks of Cyberspace and the United Kingdom

by jonathanbishop

Bishop, J. 2011, “All’s WELL that Ends WELL: A Comparative Analysis of the Constitutional and Administrative Frameworks of Cyberspace and the United Kingdom”, in: A. Dudley, J. Braman & G. Vincenti (Eds.), Investigating Cyber Law and Cyber Ethics: Issues, Impacts and Practices, IGI Global.

Category : Publications
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

Tough on data misuse, tough on the causes of data misuse: A review of New Labour’s approach to information security and regulating the misuse of digital information (1997-2010)

by jonathanbishop

Bishop, J. 2010b, “Tough on data misuse, tough on the causes of data misuse: A review of New Labour’s approach to information security and regulating the misuse of digital information (1997-2010)”, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 299-303.

Category : Publications
0 Comm
17th Dec2011

The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments

by jonathanbishop

Bishop, J. 2003, “The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 546-556.

Category : Publications
0 Comm
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