Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies

The Communities and Technologies 2013 conference received 46 submissions for full papers and 12 submissions for research in progress papers. From these submissions, 17 papers were selected to appear at the conference (29%). All submitted papers were subjected to double blind peer review by an independent international program committee of 51 experts.

Road safety knowledge exchange and capacity building between China and Australia

Road traffic injuries are one of the major public health burdens worldwide. The United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011-2020) implores all nations to work to reduce this burden. This decade represents a unique and historic period of time in the field of road safety. Information exchange and co-operation between nations is an important step in achieving the goal. The burden of road crashes, fatalities and injuries is not equally distributed. We know that low and middle-income countries experience the majority of the road trauma burden. Therefore it is imperative that these countries learn from the successes of others that have developed and implemented road safety laws, public education campaigns and countermeasures over many years and have achieved significant road trauma reductions as a result. China is one of the countries experiencing a large road trauma burden. Vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists make up a large proportion of fatalities and injuries in China. Speeding, impaired/drug driving, distracted driving, vehicle overloading, inadequate road infrastructure, limited use of safety restraints and helmets, and limited road safety training have all been identified as contributing to the problem. Some important steps have been taken to strengthen China’s approach, including increased penalties for drunk driving in May 2011 and increased attention to school bus safety in 2011/12. However, there is still a large amount of work needed to improve the current road safety position in China. This paper provides details of a program to assist with road safety knowledge exchange between China and Australia that was funded by the Australian Government which was undertaken in the latter part of 2012. The four month program provided the opportunity for the first author to work closely with key agencies in Australia that are responsible for policy development and implementation of a broad range of road safety initiatives. In doing so, an in-depth understanding was gained about key road safety strategies in Australia and processes for developing and implementing them. Insights were also gained into the mechanisms used for road safety policy development, implementation and evaluation in several Australian jurisdictions. Road traffic law and enforcement issues were explored with the relevant jurisdictional transport and police agencies to provide a greater understanding of how Chinese laws and practices could be enhanced. Working with agencies responsible for public education and awareness campaigns about road safety in Australia also provided relevant information about how to promote road safety at the broader community level in China. Finally, the program provided opportunities to work closely with several world-renowned Australian research centres and key expert researchers to enhance opportunities for ongoing road safety research in China. The overall program provided the opportunity for the first author to develop knowledge in key areas of road safety strategy development, implementation and management which are directly relevant to the current situation in China. This paper describes some main observations and findings from participation in the program.

Sustainable creative career development pathways for young people in Tanzania : a case study

Tanzania has a rich and diverse cultural history based in community cultural life. However, at present, young people have limited opportunity to exploit this richness of traditional knowledge and engage in creative jobs as their means of future sustainable employment. Hence, the significant challenge remains: how to integrate and enhance the traditional knowledge in a learning strategy, while there is no “inter-ministerial action and institutional mechanisms” (United Nations 2008, 33-35) to promote creative employment for young people. This article reports on a case study that examined how the two Ministries of Culture and Education might work together to support Tanzania’s young people to secure, and engage successfully in creative jobs. The case study employed mixed methods, incorporating questionnaires, interviews and focus groups. The study was undertaken in Dar-Es-Salaam, Mwanza, Bagamoyo, Dodoma, Lindi and Morogoro from July to October, 2012. This paper discusses some of the issues and argues that there is no practical utilization of traditional knowledge and skills in “putting education to work” (UNESCO 2012, 170) for the better prospects of young people and to reveal the story of their lives. Although this study is specific to Tanzania, the case may also apply to other developing countries.

International juvenile (in)justice : penal severity and rights compliance

This article focuses on the anomalies and contradictions surrounding the notion of ‘international juvenile justice’, whether in its pessimistic (neoliberal penality and penal severity) or optimistic (universal children’s rights and rights compliance) incarnations. It argues for an analysis which recognises firstly, the uneven, multi-facetted and heterogeneous nature of the processes of globalisation and secondly, how the global, the international, the national and the local are not mutually exclusive but continually interact to re-constitute, re-make and challenge each other.

Islamic contributions to the International Organization for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE)

This presentation introduces the International Organization for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE), outlining its history, structure, principles and activities. It discusses the role of IOSTE as a values-oriented STE research organization established in response to cold war ideologies with the aim of encouraging dialogue and academic exchange. The presentation then highlights the recent engagement of IOSTE with STE in predominantly Muslim countries. It examines quantitatively and qualitatively the increasing contributions from researchers in these countries, and outlines possible future engagements which could lead to closer research collaborations and relationships between STE academics in Muslim and non-Muslim countries.

Creative industries : a new pathway

The creative industries have become a key part of the economic development of many nations, with a particularly lively debate in the developing world taking place now.

Toward a more holistic analysis of international news flows

The study of international news flows has been a dominant topic of international communication research during the past 50 years. This paper critically reviews past approaches to the analysis of news flows and identifies the main strands of research in this field. In line with some previous critiques of the field, we argue that past research has for too long been influenced by dichotomous debates that failed to take account of the complexities of international news decisions. A new direction is needed in order for news flow research to provide better answers to the recurring questions. This new direction is not a break from past approaches but rather an integration of all different approaches, which would provide researchers with a more holistic framework for analyzing international news flows. This new approach calls for a combination of political, economic, geographic, historical, social and cultural factors, including perspectives from other disciplines, such as anthropology and linguistics.

Remarkable objects : supporting collaboration in a creative environment

In this paper, we report the results of a field trial of a Ubicomp system called CAM that is aimed at supporting and enhancing collaboration in a design studio environment. CAM uses a mobile-tagging application which allows designers to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design objects in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. The purpose of our field trial was to explore the role of augmented objects in supporting and enhancing creative work. Our results show that CAM was used not only to support participants' mutual awareness and coordination but also to facilitate designers in appropriating their augmented design objects to be explorative, extendable and playful, supporting creative aspects of design work. In general, our results show how CAM transformed static design objects into 'remarkable' objects that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible.

Space as a resource in creative design practices

Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in two industrial design departments and two design companies, we explore the role of spatial arrangements for supporting creative design practices within different design studios. From our results, we show that designers explicitly make use of the physical space for: 1) communicating and inspiring design ideas; 2) exploring design solutions, and; 3) managing design projects. We believe that these design practices could bring insightful implications for developing ubiquitous technologies to support the design profession.

International entrepreneurship and firm performance over economic crisis

Small and medium firms (SMEs) that operate in global markets are vulnerable to external shocks in uncertain, hostile and volatile business environments given their limited resources and inexperience. In such environments entrepreneurial firms respond by making strategic choices to mitigate such vulnerabilities. This research examines one such important strategic choice – entrepreneurial posturing and its link to financial performance in Finnish SMEs during the global financial crisis. Findings suggest that the dimensions of entrepreneurial posturing have a differential effect on firm performance depending upon the severity of the business environment as well as the firm’s degree of internationalization. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and directions for future research provided.

Critical reflections on the use of participatory methodologies to build evaluation capacities in international development organisations

There has been a greater focus on strengthening evaluation capacity building (ECB) within development organisations in recent years. This can be attributed in part to the growing appreciation of the value of participatory and collaborative forms of evaluation. Evaluation is increasingly seen as an ongoing learning process and an important means of strengthening capacity and improving organisational performance (Horton et al., 2003:7). While there are many benefits of using participatory methodologies in ECB projects, our experiences and a review of the literature in this area highlight the many challenges, issues and contradictions that can affect the success of such ECB efforts. We discuss these issues, drawing on our learnings from the ongoing participatory action research (PAR) project 'Assessing Communication for Social Change’ (AC4SC). This four year project, which began in 2007, is a collaboration between communication and development academics and evaluation specialists from two Australian universities and communication for development practitioners and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff in the NGO Equal Access Nepal (EAN). The aim is to develop, implement, and evaluate a participatory methodology for assessing the social change impacts of community radio programs produced by EAN. It builds on previous projects that used ethnographic action research (EAR) methodology (Tacchi et al., 2007).

Critical reflections on the use of participatory methodologies to build evaluation capacities in international development organisations

"In this chapter the authors present a critique of Participatory Evaluation as worked in development projects, in this case, in Nepal. The article works between established claims that Participatory Evaluation builds capacity at programmatic and organisational levels, and the specific experiences of these claims in the authors’ current work. They highlight the need to address key difficulties such as high turn-over of staff and resulting loss of capacity to engage in Participatory Evaluation, and the difficulty of communication between academic as compared with local practical wisdoms. A key issue is the challenge of addressing the inevitable issues of power inequities that such approaches encounter. While Participatory Evaluation has been around for some time, it has only enjoyed more widespread recognition of its value in comparatively recent times, with its uptake in international development environments. To this extent, the practice is still in its early stages of development, and Jo, June and Michael’s work contributes to strengthening and more comprehensively understanding it. With regard to the meta-theme of this publication, this chapter is an example of how context not only influences the methodology to be used and the praxis of how it is to be used, but contributes to early explication of the core nature of an emerging methodology."

Managing creativity on the margins : a comparative study of Beijing’s Songzhuang Art District and Hangzhou’s White Horse Lake Creative Eco-City

In the past decade the ‘creative cluster’ has become a driver of urban renewal in China. Many cluster developments attract human capital and investment to post-industrial spaces. This paper looks at two developments which are more post-agricultural than post-industrial: the first is Songzhuang, a large scale contemporary art community situated on the eastern fringe of Beijing, the second is Hangzhou’s White Horse Lake Creative Eco-City, a ‘mixed variety’ cluster model which integrates elements of art, fashion, design and animation. The common factor in both cases is how they came into existence. In both districts urban creative workers moved into a rural environment. Drawing on interviews with planners, officials, and residents we investigate the challenges of sustaining such fringe clusters.

Australian International Cinema

The limited terms in which international production is currently discussed in Australia do not allow for serious consideration of the multiple and complex ways such production enables new connections with filmmakers and audiences around the world. The narrowness of the debate also prevents us from considering fully what that production entails for Australian cinema, what it means, who it speaks to, and how it could spark new conversations about the possibilities of filmmaking and storytelling in this country.