Designing an E-Mail Prototype to Enhance Effective Communication and Task Management: A Case Study

This paper deals with communicational breakdowns and misunderstandings in computer mediated communication (CMC) and ways to recover from them or to prevent them. The paper describes a case study of CMC conducted in a company named Artigiani. We observed communication and conducted content analysis of e-mail messages, focusing on message exchanges between customer service representatives (CSRs) and their contacts. In addition to task management difficulties, we identified communication breakdowns that result from differences between perspectives, and from the lack of contextual information, mainly technical background and professional jargon at the customers’ side. We examined possible ways to enhance CMC and accordingly designed a prototype for an e-mail user interface that emphasizes a communicational strategy called contextualization as a central component for obtaining effective communication and for supporting effective management and control of organizational activities, especially handling orders, price quoting, and monitoring the supply and installation of products.

Importance and Benefits of OPEN SCIENCE for Ubiquitous Sharing, Dissemination and Impact

While openness is well applied to software development and exploitation (open sources), and successfully applied to new business models (open innovation), fundamental and applied research seems to lag behind. Even after decades of advocacy, in 2011 only 50% of the public-funded research was freely available and accessible (Archambault et al., 2013). The current research workflows, stemming from a pre-internet age, result in loss of opportunity not only for the researchers themselves (cf. extensive literature on topic at Open Access citation project, http://opcit.eprints.org/), but also slows down innovation and application of research results (Houghton & Swan, 2011). Recent studies continue to suggest that lack of awareness among researchers, rather than lack of e-infrastructure and methodology, is a key reason for this loss of opportunity (Graziotin 2014). The session will focus on why Open Science is ideally suited to achieving tenure-relevant researcher impact in a “Publish or Perish” reality. Open Science encapsulates tools and approaches for each step along the research cycle: from Open Notebook Science to Open Data, Open Access, all setting up researchers for capitalising on social media in order to promote and discuss, and establish unexpected collaborations. Incorporating these new approaches into a updated personal research workflow is of strategic beneficial for young researchers, and will prepare them for expected long term funder trends towards greater openness and demand for greater return on investment (ROI) for public funds.

The Methodology of the Subsistence Minimum Calculation for Developing Countries and its Computation on the Georgian Example

This article shows the social importance of subsistence minimum in Georgia. The methodology of its calculation is also shown. We propose ways of improving the calculation of subsistence minimum in Georgia and how to extend it for other developing countries. The weights of food and non-food expenditures in the subsistence minimum baskets are essential in these calculations. Daily consumption value of the minimum food basket has been calculated too. The average consumer expenditures on food supply and the other expenditures to the share are considered in dynamics. Our methodology of the subsistence minimum calculation is applied for the case of Georgia. However, it can be used for similar purposes based on data from other developing countries, where social stability is achieved, and social inequalities are to be actualized. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): H.5.3, J.1, J.4, G.3.