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There is considerable on-going research aimed at devising means of evaluating the contribution information and communication technology (ICT) makes towards development, of which this thesis forms a part. It specifically seeks to investigate how a structured approach can support the evaluation of the ICT contribution to development. The need to demonstrate that ICT actually contributes to development is a concern for all those involved in policy and implementation of ICT for development (ICT4D). This research therefore adopted a broad perspective in developing the evaluation approach, particularly applying it to initiatives in Uganda as a test bed. The research further embraced an interdisciplinary approach to accommodate the complex ICT interactions. It merged concepts from information systems, development studies and applied decision theories to devise an evaluation approach. The design science research paradigm facilitated the understanding of what constitutes ICT-related development as basis for developing and testing the approach. Both case study and survey research strategies were applied to facilitate data collection at the different stages of the research. This thesis proposes a model and criteria for the evaluation of ICT-related development. Qualitative indicators are proposed, validated and tested for various dimensions including research and education, healthcare, economic opportunities, political freedoms and psychological wellbeing. Findings confirm the multidimensional and complex nature of the interactions of ICT in development. For instance, ICT benefits may not be restricted to specific goals, severally characterised by unintended benefits. This corroborates the essence of multidimensional evaluations to ensure a more meaningful understanding and establishing of ICT4D benefits. The majority of the proposed indicators could appropriately evaluate the ICT contribution to development. Notably, the quest by decision-makers for quantitative measures in evaluating development benefits is still apparent. Therefore, it is imperative that qualitative and quantitative approaches complement each other in the evaluation of the ICT contribution to development, a subject that can be addressed in subsequent studies. Furthermore, ICT4D benefits can be categorised in terms of significance to an initiative, for example primary and/or secondary contributors to development. For instance, while cost reductions and savings represent an important benefit, this research established that they were secondary to several others, such as providing a timely service in as far as improved access to healthcare is concerned. This is another aspect that would benefit from further investigation.

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM) is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal (ISSN: 2075-9517) published twice a year. It addresses theory and practice in the areas of eDemocracy and Open Government as well as eGovernment, eParticipation, and eSociety. JeDEM publishes ongoing and completed research, case studies and project descriptions that are selected after a rigorous blind review by experts in the field.

Innovation is critical for enterprises and the country's economy, and it has resulted in an improvement in living standards. There may be appropriate lessons to learn from other countries, but their adoption must be assessed due to education and living standards variations. This paper aims to build an in-depth understanding of the stimulating factors for ICT innovations from Sweden, and examines their adoption in the context of a developing country, Sri Lanka. ICT innovations significantly impact development in other sectors, as they can ease doing business and other essential services. This study is based on seven interviews, including key people leading innovation activities in Sweden. Then, it critically analyses and presents the application of stimulating factors in Sweden to the context of a developing country, namely Sri Lanka. The results indicate that education and mindset, a risk-taking environment, embracing failures, digitalisation and collaboration are the critical determinants of ICT innovations in Sweden. This research is vital for educational policymakers in universities, technology transfer offices, and governmental policymakers.

The growing importance of cyberspace to modern society, and its increasing use as an arena for dispute, is becoming a national security concern for governments and armed forces globally. The special characteristics of cyberspace, such as its asymmetric nature, the lack of attribution, the low cost of entry, the legal ambiguity, and its role as an efficient medium for protest, crime, espionage and military aggression, makes it an attractive domain for nation-states as well as non-state actors in cyber conflict. This paper studies the various non-state actors who coexist in cyberspace, examines their motives and incitements, and analyzes how and when their objectives coincide with those of nation-states. Literature suggests that many nations are currently pursuing cyberwarfare capabilities, oftentimes by leveraging criminal organizations and irregular forces. Employment of such non-state actors as hacktivists, patriot hackers, and cybermilitia in state-on-state cyberspace operations has also proved to be a usable model for conducting cyberattacks. The paper concludes that cyberspace is emerging as a new tool for state power that will likely reshape future warfare. However, due to the lack of concrete cyberwarfare experience, and the limited encounters of legitimate cyberattacks, it is hard to precisely assess future effects, risks and potentials.

Interactive mobile technologies provide an emerging opportunity for citizens to engage with and enhance urban climate resilience, both as providers of locally situated data on climate variables, impacts and climate adaptation measures as well as to obtain information on local conditions and recommendations. This paper examines the process of co-designing a citizen science application for urban climate resilience in four European cities. Further, the paper studies if and how the system enables knowledge co-production to increase urban resilience following process principles for co-production of climate services and discusses the legitimacy, transparency, credibility, and relevance of the process. We further assess the role that a citizen science climate service could play as a boundary object in knowledge co-production. We draw on experiences from a co-design process that included municipal stakeholders from different sectors as well as municipal employees and civil society end-users involved in campaigns. This study identified a set of barriers and enablers for the co-design process and concludes that the CitizenSensing application can fulfil the role of a boundary object, but that the co-design process is a balancing act between navigating time constraints, including stakeholders different and changing demands and perspectives while retaining a high level of flexibility and reflexivity. ; Funding Agencies|FCT (Portugal)Portuguese Foundation for Science and TechnologyEuropean Commission [ERA4CS/0001/2016]; FORMAS (Sweden)Swedish Research Council Formas [201701719]; NWO (The Netherlands)Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)Netherlands Government [438.17.805]; RCN (Norway) [274192]; European UnionEuropean Commission [690462]

Many surveillance tasks in military command and control involve monitoring for change in a visual display environment in order to discover potential hazards or new opportunities. Effective change detection in various situational pictures is a requisite for battlespace understanding. The detection of unexpected events is particularly difficult and missed events may cause malicious outcomes in contexts characterized by high levels of complexity and risk. We present examples of change detection failures in the military domain, and explain why and how the psychological phenomena of change blindness and inattentional blindness can generate such failures. We further give an overview of existing solutions to these problems and point out a specific issue, coping with unexpected events, where effective solutions are missing today. Inadequate expectations may be a result of misdirection by the enemy. This article demonstrates a new concept – an adaptive attention aware system (A3S) for enhanced change detection. The A3S is a concept of gentle support. It is based on cuing of visual attention by a non-obtrusive flash cue in the display (bottom-up), to compensate for guidance by inadequate expectations (top-down) in situations influenced by high levels of uncertainty.

Integration, inclusion, and equity constitute fundamental dimensions of democracy in post-World War II societies and their institutions. The study presented here reports upon the ways in which individuals and institutions both use and account for the roles that technologies, including ICT, play in disabling and enabling access for learning in higher education for all. Technological innovations during the 20th and 21st centuries, including ICT, have been heralded as holding significant promise for revolutionizing issues of access in societal institutions like schools, healthcare services, etc. (at least in the global North). Taking a socially oriented perspective, the study presented in this paper focuses on an ethnographically framed analysis of two datasets that critically explores the role that technologies, including ICT, play in higher education for individuals who are "differently abled" and who constitute a variation on a continuum of capabilities. Functionality as a dimension of everyday life in higher education in the 21st century is explored through the analysis of (i) case studies of two "differently abled" students in Sweden and (ii) current support services at universities in Sweden. The findings make visible the work that institutions and their members do through analyses of the organization of time and space and the use of technologies in institutional settings against the backdrop of individuals' accountings and life trajectories. This study also highlights the relevance of multi-scale data analyses for revisiting the ways in which identity positions become framed or understood within higher education. ; Special Issue "Information and Communication Technology in Higher Education"

Co-operation between research and industry and society, and the notion of innovation systems, are high on the agenda of national as well as international research politics. However, how to make co-operation between researchers and practitioners work, and what kind of research results could come out of such co-operation, is hardly discussed. The article uses evidence from three projects in the areas e-government and telecommunication to reflect on such co-operation. Scientific understanding and practices of design, development and use of ICT challenge and inform each other in these co-operative projects, which we have started to refer to as 'situated innovation'. The article discusses the role of the researcher in such contexts, the character of the research results, and means to co-ordinate different rhythms and rationales in order to make research and practices of ICT development and use mutually enhancing.

Qualitative and Critical Research in Information Systems and Human Computer Interaction explores the history and adoption of qualitative and critical research in Information Systems (IS) and contrasts it with the growth of similar methods/theories in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and, to a lesser, extent Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). The supposition behind the comparison was that the areas overlap in subject matter and would overlap in methods and authors. However, marked differences were observed in the structure of publications, conferences, and on social media that led to questions about the extent to which the fields shared a common framework. The authors find that the history of each discipline reflects institutional factors that affected the respective timelines for the use of these approaches. This leads them to consider a sociological epistemic framework, which explains the differences quite well. It also supports characterizations of the culture of IS made by members, as having open paradigm and high collegiality, described as an adhocracy. The authors propose that qualitative and critical research developed interdependently in IS. Aside from institutional factors, a further difference in uptake of methods and critical framework comes from the US/Europe divide in research traditions and the political/epistemic climates affecting research in the respective regions. Research from beyond the transatlantic traditions postdates the developments covered here but is touched on at the end of the monograph. The primary goal of Qualitative and Critical Research in Information Systems and Human Computer Interaction is to better understand the ways the IS research community differentiates itself into diverse constituencies, and how these constituencies interact in the field's complex processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. Another goal is to create cross-disciplinary discussion and build on related work in the fields. This is important in the era of platforms with global reach, and the concurrent development of powerful AI and analytics capabilities that both intrude on daily life and try to emulate human intelligence. ; Fulltexten är accepterad version - förlaget gett tillstånd till publicering av denna version.

This paper is about the networks around the fires in the Brazilian Amazon forest during 2019 in tweets with the English hashtags #PrayForAmazonas, #ActForTheAmazon and #AmazonFire. We have studied 2517 tweets. Both the languages and the content of the tweets were taken into consideration to see who is assembled and what discursive elements are used in the framing. Our results indicate that the fires are framed as a global concern, beyond the Brazilian borders, especially as the lungs of the world. The framing of responsibility for the fires is focused on president Bolsonaro, who is assembled in many tweets, while animals and indigenous people are framed as victims. We conclude that the tweets in English tend to produce more relationships in terms of likes and retweets, in comparison to tweets in Portuguese and Spanish. In addition, the role of politicians and celebrities seems critical in getting traction around a hashtag and making it trending. ; Funding Agencies|Linkoping University

Abstract: This article is based on a research project studying political discussions in the Nordic LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-, Transsexual) community Qruiser. These discussions were very antagonistic and rude. The aim is therefore to understand what motivated participation in these heated discussions. The focus is on threads in the political forum on Qruiser. The research is nethnographic through online interviews, participant observations in, and content analyses of, political discussions threads during the month of November 2012. By using framing theory as an analytical tool, the article seeks to answer which frames attracted and mobilized participation and how this was done. In the article I find that polarizing frames of the left vs the right, the xenophobic vs the political correct, together with a truth and a game frame was used to motivated participation in the Qruiser forum threads.

The elections 2010 were the first in Sweden where social media platforms were used to a large extent by politicians and parties in their campaigns. In this paper we follow the liberal parliamentarian Nina Larsson, who in tandem with traditional election campaigning used social media platforms with the guidance of a local communication agency, Hello Clarice. The paper is theoretically grounded in an understanding of our time as late modern, of social media use as expressive and web campaigning as to large extent revolving around image-management. The research question that will be attended to in this paper is how Nina Larsson used social media platforms in her campaign negotiate the image of herself. The methods used for empirical data-gathering are inspired by (n)ethnography, with both participant observation online and offline, interviews as well as content analyses of Nina's social media postings. Results indicate that she used social media platforms to control her political image, to amplify selected text - texts that often originated in offline/broadcast media – and to negotiate a position within the Liberal Party rather than to deliberate with potential voters

Museums are participating in the capturing of global data for the perceived benefit of improved relationships with the public. This article proposes a framework for critically analyzing the ratification of museum visitors and visitor engagement, combining a critical lens from data studies with a social view of datafication as practice—a set of practices within a sociotechnical assemblage that is continuously reproduced by the choices made within and outside the museum. Museums are situated at the intersection of PierreBourdieu's economic, cultural, and political fields; thus, I highlight some of the external social and technological pressures driving datafication in museums. Relying on public accounts and previous case studies, I argue that datafication of visitor engagement is made to work through data loops: circular processes between institutional practices of museums and social practices of audiences where data are collected, processed, and decided upon.

This study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants' explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-report items and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The results reveal that information emanating from online news had a significant influence on explicit and implicit attitudes while that of social networking sites did not. Overall, negative items had a stronger impact than positive ones, more so in online news compared to social networking sites. Negative information from either type of media was more likely to change participants' explicit attitudes in a negative direction and as a consequence also change their vote. Practical implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.

Information Systems (IS) and Human Computer Interaction(HCI)–including Computer-Supported Cooperative Work(CSCW)–address the development and adoption of computingsystems by organizations, individuals, and teams. Whileeach has its own emphasis, the timelines for adopting qualitativeand critical research differ dramatically. IS used bothin the late 1980s, but critical theory appeared in HCI onlyin 2000. Using a hermeneutic literature review, the papertraces these histories; it applies academic cultures theoryas an explanatory framework. Institutional factors includeepistemic bases of source disciplines, number and centralityof publication outlets, and political and geographic contexts.Key innovations in IS are covered in detail. The rise ofplatformization drives the fields toward a common scopeof study with an imperative to address societal issues thatemerge at scale.