Systematising knowledge management in projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a practicable systems-based approach to knowledge management (KM) in a project environment, to encourage organisations to unlock the value in their review processes. It relies on knowledge capture and storage at decision review points, to enrich individual, team and organisational learning during the project life cycle. The project's phases are typically represented horizontally with deliverables (objectives) or project "promises" as the desirable outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to give expression through introducing a vertical dimension to facilitate the KM process. A model is proposed that conceptualises project-specific knowledge drawing on and feeding into the organisation's knowledge management system (KMS) at tactical and strategic levels. Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper links concepts from systems theory with KM, to produce a model to identify, collate, and optimise project-based knowledge and integrate it into the management process. Findings – The application of the system theory approach enriches the knowledge generated by a project, and feeds it into the next phase of that project. At the same time, it contributes to the individual's and project team's KM, specifies possible courses of action, together with risks, costs and benefits and thus it expands the organisation's higher level KMS. Research limitations/implications – The concept suggests that the knowledge capture, storage and sharing process may best be undertaken holistically, in view of the systems relationships between the tasks. Systems theory structures this process. Research opportunities include studying the interfaces between levels of KM, in relation to the project's progress. Practical implications – Reconceptualisation of the project as a knowledge creation process may improve the project's progress as well as add to the individual's, project team's, and wider organisation's knowledge base. An example is given. Originality/value – This paper illuminates the broader potential of under-utilised opportunities in well-known management approaches to add dimension to the business project, of knowledge creation, storage and sharing.

Mobiles In-a-Box : Reflections on Developing a Toolkit with Grassroots Human Rights Advocates

In 2008 Tactical Tech published 'Mobiles in-a-box': a toolkit designed to help human rights organisations and advocates use mobile technology in their work in Africa. This chapter reflects on the participatory development process used to develop the toolkit.

A strategy for making media

It’s never been easier for rights advocates to create and distribute their own media productions, using text, audio, video and the internet. Rights advocates can make media to raise awareness about an issue, to convey new information that is not in the public domain, or to mobilise people to take action. However, careful planning, in the form of a strategy document, is essential to ensure that the media you make genuinely contributes to reaching your advocacy goals. Whether you are an individual rights advocate, a group or an organisation, this chapter will take you through the steps involved in creating a strategic plan for making any kind of media as part of a campaign or project.

The relationship between construction firm strategies and innovation outcomes

Survey results provide a preliminary assessment of the relative contribution of a range of tactical business strategies to innovation performance by firms in the Australian construction industry. Over 1,300 firms were surveyed in 2004, resulting in a response rate of 29%. Respondents were classified as high, medium or low innovators according to an innovation index based on the novelty and impact of their innovations and their adoption of listed technological and organizational advances. The relative significance of 23 business strategies concerning (1) employees, (2) marketing, (3) technology, (4) knowledge and (5) relationships was examined by determining the extent to which they distinguished high innovators from low innovators. The individual business strategies that most strongly distinguished high innovators were (1) ‘investing in R&D’, (2) ‘participating in partnering and alliances on projects’, (3) ‘ensuring project learnings are transferred into continuous business processes’, (4) ‘monitoring international best practice’, and (5) ‘recruiting new graduates’. Of the five types of strategies assessed, marketing strategies were the least significant in supporting innovation. The results provide practical guidance to managers in project-based industries wishing to improve their innovation performance.

Participation and social order in the playground

This study investigates the everyday practices of young children acting in their social worlds within the context of the school playground. It employs an ethnographic ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. In the context of child participation rights advanced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and childhood studies, the study considers children’s social worlds and their participation agendas. The participants of the study were a group of young children in a preparatory year setting in a Queensland school. These children, aged 4 to 6 years, were videorecorded as they participated in their day-to-day activities in the classroom and in the playground. Data collection took place over a period of three months, with a total of 26 hours of video data. Episodes of the video-recordings were shown to small groups of children and to the teacher to stimulate conversations about what they saw on the video. The conversations were audio-recorded. This method acknowledged the child’s standpoint and positioned children as active participants in accounting for their relationships with others. These accounts are discussed as interactionally built comments on past joint experiences and provided a starting place for analysis of the video-recorded interaction. Four data chapters are presented in this thesis. Each data chapter investigates a different topic of interaction. The topics include how children use “telling” as a tactical tool in the management of interactional trouble, how children use their “ideas” as possessables to gain ownership of a game and the interactional matters that follow, how children account for interactional matters and bid for ownership of “whose idea” for the game and finally, how a small group of girls orientated to a particular code of conduct when accounting for their actions in a pretend game of “school”. Four key themes emerged from the analysis. The first theme addresses two arenas of action operating in the social world of children, pretend and real: the “pretend”, as a player in a pretend game, and the “real”, as a classroom member. These two arenas are intertwined. Through inferences to explicit and implicit “codes of conduct”, moral obligations are invoked as children attempt to socially exclude one another, build alliances and enforce their own social positions. The second theme is the notion of shared history. This theme addresses the history that the children reconstructed, and acts as a thread that weaves through their interactions, with implications for present and future relationships. The third theme is around ownership. In a shared context, such as the playground, ownership is a highly contested issue. Children draw on resources such as rules, their ideas as possessables, and codes of behaviour as devices to construct particular social and moral orders around owners of the game. These themes have consequences for children’s participation in a social group. The fourth theme, methodological in nature, shows how the researcher was viewed as an outsider and novice and was used as a resource by the children. This theme is used to inform adult-child relationships. The study was situated within an interest in participation rights for children and perspectives of children as competent beings. Asking children to account for their participation in playground activities situates children as analysers of their own social worlds and offers adults further information for understanding how children themselves construct their social interactions. While reporting on the experiences of one group of children, this study opens up theoretical questions about children’s social orders and these influences on their everyday practices. This thesis uncovers how children both participate in, and shape, their everyday social worlds through talk and interaction. It investigates the consequences that taken-for-granted activities of “playing the game” have for their social participation in the wider culture of the classroom. Consideration of this significance may assist adults to better understand and appreciate the social worlds of young children in the school playground.

Voter behaviour and constitutional change in Australia since 1967

Australian Constitutional referendums have been part of the Australian political system since federation. Up to the year 1999 (the time of the last referendum in Australia), constitutional change in Australia does not have a good history of acceptance. Since 1901, there have been 44 proposed constitutional changes with eight gaining the required acceptance according to section 128 of the Australian Constitution. In the modern era since 1967, there have been 20 proposals over seven referendum votes for a total of four changes. Over this same period, there have been 13 federal general elections which have realised change in government just five times. This research examines the electoral behaviour of Australian voters from 1967 to 1999 for each referendum. Party identification has long been a key indicator in general election voting. This research considers whether the dominant theory of voter behaviour in general elections (the Michigan Model) provides a plausible explanation for voting in Australian referendums. In order to explain electoral behaviour in each referendum, this research has utilised available data from the Australian Electoral Commission, the 1996 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data, and the 1999 Australian Constitutional Referendum Study. This data has provided the necessary variables required to measure the impact of the Michigan Model of voter behaviour. Measurements have been conducted using bivariate and multivariate analyses. Each referendum provides an overview of the events at the time of the referendum as well as the =yes‘ and =no‘ cases at the time each referendum was initiated. Results from this research provide support for the Michigan Model of voter behaviour in Australian referendum voting. This research concludes that party identification, as a key variable of the Michigan Model, shows that voters continue to take their cues for voting from the political party they identify with in Australian referendums. However, the outcome of Australian referendums clearly shows that partisanship is only one of a number of contributory factors in constitutional referendums.

Two voices : the marginalised body as a voice & Imperfect Offerings a novel

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of self-harm as a form of political protest using two different, but complementary, methods of inquiry: a theoretical research project and a novel. Through these two approaches, to the same research problem, I examine how we can re-position the body that self-harms in political protest from weapon to voice; and in doing so find a path towards ethical and equitable dialogue between marginalised and mainstream communities. The theoretical, or academic, portion of the thesis examines self-harm as protest, positing these acts as a form of tactical selfharm, and acknowledge its emergence as a voice for the otherwise silenced in the public sphere. Through the use of phenomenology and feminist theory I examine the body as site for political agency, the circumstances which surround the use of the body for protest, and the reaction to tactical self-harm by the individual and the state. Using Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, and the dialogic space I propose that by ‘hearing’ the body engaged in tactical selfharm we come closer to entering into an ethical dialogue with the otherwise silenced in our communities (locally, nationally and globally). The novel, Imperfect Offerings, explores these ideas in a fictional world, and allows me to put faces, names and lives to those who are compelled to harm their bodies to be heard. Also using Bakhtin’s framework I encourage a dialogue between the critical and creative parts of the thesis, challenging the traditional paradigm of creative PhD projects as creative work and exegesis.

Health, endogenous time preference, and inequality : a political economy perspective

We study an overlapping-generations model in which agents' mortality risks, and consequently impatience, are endogenously determined by private and public investment in health care. Revenues allocated for public health care arc determined by a voting process. We find that the degree of substitutability between public and private health expenditures matters for macroeconomic outcomes of the model. Higher substitutability implies a “crowding-out" effect, which in turn impacts adversely on morality risks and impatience leading to lower public expenditures on health care in the political equilibrium. Consequently, higher substitutability is associated with greater polarization in wealth, and long-run distributions that are bimodal.

A political economy perspective on persistent inequality, inflation, and redistribution

In this paper we examine the dynamics of the link between inequality and inflation from a political economy perspective. We consider a simple dynamic general equilibrium model in which agents vote over the desired inflation rate in each period, and inequality is persistent. Inflation in our model is a mechanism of redistribution, and we find that the link between inequality and inflation within any period or over time depends on institutional and preference related parameters. Furthermore, we find that differences in the initial distributions of wealth can yield a diverse set of patterns for the evolution of the inflation and inequality link. Relative to existing literature, our model leads to more precise predictions about the inflation-inequality correlation. To that end, results in the extant empirical literature on the inflation and inequality link need to be interpreted with caution.

Compliant cryptologic protocols

Literally, the word compliance suggests conformity in fulfilling official requirements. The thesis presents the results of the analysis and design of a class of protocols called compliant cryptologic protocols (CCP). The thesis presents a notion for compliance in cryptosystems that is conducive as a cryptologic goal. CCP are employed in security systems used by at least two mutually mistrusting sets of entities. The individuals in the sets of entities only trust the design of the security system and any trusted third party the security system may include. Such a security system can be thought of as a broker between the mistrusting sets of entities. In order to provide confidence in operation for the mistrusting sets of entities, CCP must provide compliance verification mechanisms. These mechanisms are employed either by all the entities or a set of authorised entities in the system to verify the compliance of the behaviour of various participating entities with the rules of the system. It is often stated that confidentiality, integrity and authentication are the primary interests of cryptology. It is evident from the literature that authentication mechanisms employ confidentiality and integrity services to achieve their goal. Therefore, the fundamental services that any cryptographic algorithm may provide are confidentiality and integrity only. Since controlling the behaviour of the entities is not a feasible cryptologic goal,the verification of the confidentiality of any data is a futile cryptologic exercise. For example, there exists no cryptologic mechanism that would prevent an entity from willingly or unwillingly exposing its private key corresponding to a certified public key. The confidentiality of the data can only be assumed. Therefore, any verification in cryptologic protocols must take the form of integrity verification mechanisms. Thus, compliance verification must take the form of integrity verification in cryptologic protocols. A definition of compliance that is conducive as a cryptologic goal is presented as a guarantee on the confidentiality and integrity services. The definitions are employed to provide a classification mechanism for various message formats in a cryptologic protocol. The classification assists in the characterisation of protocols, which assists in providing a focus for the goals of the research. The resulting concrete goal of the research is the study of those protocols that employ message formats to provide restricted confidentiality and universal integrity services to selected data. The thesis proposes an informal technique to understand, analyse and synthesise the integrity goals of a protocol system. The thesis contains a study of key recovery,electronic cash, peer-review, electronic auction, and electronic voting protocols. All these protocols contain message format that provide restricted confidentiality and universal integrity services to selected data. The study of key recovery systems aims to achieve robust key recovery relying only on the certification procedure and without the need for tamper-resistant system modules. The result of this study is a new technique for the design of key recovery systems called hybrid key escrow. The thesis identifies a class of compliant cryptologic protocols called secure selection protocols (SSP). The uniqueness of this class of protocols is the similarity in the goals of the member protocols, namely peer-review, electronic auction and electronic voting. The problem statement describing the goals of these protocols contain a tuple,(I, D), where I usually refers to an identity of a participant and D usually refers to the data selected by the participant. SSP are interested in providing confidentiality service to the tuple for hiding the relationship between I and D, and integrity service to the tuple after its formation to prevent the modification of the tuple. The thesis provides a schema to solve the instances of SSP by employing the electronic cash technology. The thesis makes a distinction between electronic cash technology and electronic payment technology. It will treat electronic cash technology to be a certification mechanism that allows the participants to obtain a certificate on their public key, without revealing the certificate or the public key to the certifier. The thesis abstracts the certificate and the public key as the data structure called anonymous token. It proposes design schemes for the peer-review, e-auction and e-voting protocols by employing the schema with the anonymous token abstraction. The thesis concludes by providing a variety of problem statements for future research that would further enrich the literature.

Ownership structure and business evaluation practices in family SMEs : evidence from empirical research in Italy

This paper presents early results from a pilot project which aims to investigate the relationship between proprietary structure of small and medium- sized Italian family firms and their owners’ orientation towards a “business evaluation process”. Evidence from many studies point out the importance of family business in a worldwide economic environment: in Italy 93% of the businesses are represented by family firms; 98% of them have less than 50 employees (Italian Association of Family Firms, 2004) so we judged family SMEs as a relevant field of investigation. In this study we assume a broad definition of family business as “a firm whose control (50% of shares or voting rights) is closely held by the members of the same family” (Corbetta,1995). “Business evaluation process” is intended here both as “continuous evaluation process” (which is the expression of a well developed managerial attitude) or as an “immediate valuation” (i.e. in the case of new shareholder’s entrance, share exchange among siblings, etc). We set two hypotheses to be tested in this paper: the first is “quantitative” and aims to verify whether the number of owners (independent variable) in a family firm is positively correlated to the business evaluation process. If a family firm is led by only one subject, it is more likely that personal values, culture and feelings may affect his choices more than “purely economic opportunities”; so there is less concern about monitoring economic performance or about the economic value of the firm. As the shareholders’ number increases, economic aspects in managing the firm grow in importance over the personal values and "value orientation" acquires a central role. The second hypothesis investigates if and to what extent the presence of “non- family members” among the owners affects their orientation to the business evaluation process. The “Cramer’s V” test has been used to test the hypotheses; both were not confirmed from these early results; next steps will lead to make an inferential analysis on a representative sample of the population.

Grown-Up Government: Bindi for Prime Minister! (Or President!).

Last week I called the Australian federal campaign the Inception election. As we lurch toward voting day on August 21, reality has tried to kick in, but to little avail. The two leaders, Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Labor) and challenger Tony Abbott (Liberal), both of whom recently toppled their predecessors in party-room coups, are now frantically searching for their own identity. And that’s what the election itself is increasingly about. Even though both have substantial track records as ministers, they are untried as national leaders. The real conundrum of the campaign – for them, if not for voters – is: Who the heck are these people?

A review of rationale for allocating costs and payments in producing and supplying public sector information PART A of 2 Parts – Chapters 1, 2 and 3) 13 March 2011 version

This work reviews the rationale and processes for raising revenue and allocating funds to perform information intensive activities that are pertinent to the work of democratic government. ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ expresses an idea that democratic government has no higher authority than the people who agree to be bound by its rules. Democracy depends on continually learning how to develop understandings and agreements that can sustain voting majorities on which democratic law making and collective action depends. The objective expressed in constitutional terms is to deliver ‘peace, order and good government’. Meeting this objective requires a collective intellectual authority that can understand what is possible; and a collective moral authority to understand what ought to happen in practice. Facts of life determine that a society needs to retain its collective competence despite a continual turnover of its membership as people die but life goes on. Retaining this ‘collective competence’ in matters of self-government depends on each new generation: • acquiring a collective knowledge of how to produce goods and services needed to sustain a society and its capacity for self-government; • Learning how to defend society diplomatically and militarily in relation to external forces to prevent overthrow of its self-governing capacity; and • Learning how to defend society against divisive internal forces to preserve the authority of representative legislatures, allow peaceful dispute resolution and maintain social cohesion.

The social media (r)evolution : Obama's political campaign

This paper addresses how social media was used to leverage votes in new media environments. Barack Obama’s social media campaign is analysed and illustrates how the Obama brand benefited from integrating social media into the campaign. Voting behaviour has changed; politicians are continually seeking new ways to communicate with their constituents. Voting on political ‘brands’ is based on an identity or image, rather than central issues. While political parties rely upon an integrated marketing communication (IMC) approach, with a focus on building the (political) brand of the party and brand relationships, communication is no longer fully controlled by the marketers.

Minority activism : trends informing political participation across Australian communities

In the late 1990’s, intense and vigorous debate surrounded the impact of minority communities on Australia’s mainstream society. The rise of far-right populism took the stage with the introduction to the political landscape of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party, whilst John Howard’s Liberal-National Coalition Government took the fore on debate over immigration issues corresponding with an influx of irregular arrivals. In 2001, following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States of America and subsequent attacks on western targets globally, many of these issues continued to be debated through the security posturing that followed. In recent years, much effort has been afforded to countering the threat of terrorism from home grown assailants. The Government has introduced stringent legislative responses whilst researchers have studied social movements and trends within Australian communities, particularly with respect to minorities. In 2008, the Scanlon Foundation, in association with Monash University and various government entities, released its findings into its survey approach to mapping social cohesion in Australia. It identified a number of spheres of exploration which it believed were essential to measuring cohesiveness of Australian communities generally including, economic, political and socio-cultural factors (Markus and Dharmalingam, 2008). This doctoral project report will explore the political sphere as identified in the Mapping Social Cohesion project and apply it to identified minority ethnic communities. The Scanlon Foundation project identified political participation as one of a number of true indicators of social cohesion. This project acknowledges that democracy in Australia is represented predominantly by two political entities representing a vast majority of constituents under a compulsory voting regime. This essay will identify the levels of political activism achieved by minority ethnic communities and access to democratic participation within the Australian political structure. It will define a ten year period from 1999 to 2009, identifying trends and issues within minority communities that have proactively and reactively promoted engagement in achieving a political voice, framed within a mainstream-dominated political system. It will research social movements and other influential factors over that period to enrich existing knowledge in relation to political participation rates across Australian communities.