Dynamic adaptation of interaction models for stateful web services

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Bits, Atoms, and Information Sharing: new opportunities for participation

The particular characteristics and affordances of technologies play a significant role in human experience by defining the realm of possibilities available to individuals and societies. Some technological configurations, such as the Internet, facilitate peer-to-peer communication and participatory behaviors. Others, like television broadcasting, tend to encourage centralization of creative processes and unidirectional communication. In other instances still, the affordances of technologies can be further constrained by social practices. That is the case, for example, of radio which, although technically allowing peer-to-peer communication, has effectively been converted into a broadcast medium through the legislation of the airwaves. How technologies acquire particular properties, meanings and uses, and who is involved in those decisions are the broader questions explored here. Although a long line of thought maintains that technologies evolve according to the logic of scientific rationality, recent studies demonstrated that technologies are, in fact, primarily shaped by social forces in specific historical contexts. In this view, adopted here, there is no one best way to design a technological artifact or system; the selection between alternative designs—which determine the affordances of each technology—is made by social actors according to their particular values, assumptions and goals. Thus, the arrangement of technical elements in any technological artifact is configured to conform to the views and interests of those involved in its development. Understanding how technologies assume particular shapes, who is involved in these decisions and how, in turn, they propitiate particular behaviors and modes of organization but not others, requires understanding the contexts in which they are developed. It is argued here that, throughout the last century, two distinct approaches to the development and dissemination of technologies have coexisted. In each of these models, based on fundamentally different ethoi, technologies are developed through different processes and by different participants—and therefore tend to assume different shapes and offer different possibilities. In the first of these approaches, the dominant model in Western societies, technologies are typically developed by firms, manufactured in large factories, and subsequently disseminated to the rest of the population for consumption. In this centralized model, the role of users is limited to selecting from the alternatives presented by professional producers. Thus, according to this approach, the technologies that are now so deeply woven into human experience, are primarily shaped by a relatively small number of producers. In recent years, however, a group of three interconnected interest groups—the makers, hackerspaces, and open source hardware communities—have increasingly challenged this dominant model by enacting an alternative approach in which technologies are both individually transformed and collectively shaped. Through a in-depth analysis of these phenomena, their practices and ethos, it is argued here that the distributed approach practiced by these communities offers a practical path towards a democratization of the technosphere by: 1) demystifying technologies, 2) providing the public with the tools and knowledge necessary to understand and shape technologies, and 3) encouraging citizen participation in the development of technologies.

The role of qualitative data and systems thinking in addressing service decline in market towns

Retail services are a main contributor to municipal budget and are an activity that affects perceived quality-of-life, especially for those with mobility difficulties (e.g. the elderly, low income citizens). However, there is evidence of a decline in some of the services market towns provide to their citizens. In market towns, this decline has been reported all over the western world, from North America to Australia. The aim of this research was to understand retail decline and enlighten on some ways of addressing this decline, using a case study, Thornbury, a small town in the Southwest of England. Data collected came from two participatory approaches: photo-surveys and multicriteria mapping. The interpretation of data came from using participants as analysts, but also, using systems thinking (systems diagramming and social trap theory) for theory building. This research moves away from mainstream economic and town planning perspectives by making use of different methods and concepts used in anthropology and visual sociology (photo-surveys), decision-making and ecological economics (multicriteria mapping and social trap theory). In sum, this research has experimented with different methods, out of their context, to analyse retail decline in a small town. This research developed a conceptual model for retail decline and identified the existence of conflicting goals and interests and their implications for retail decline, as well as causes for these. Most of the potential causes have had little attention in the literature. This research also identified that some of the measures commonly used for dealing with retail decline may be contributing to the causes of retail decline itself. Additionally, this research reviewed some of the measures that can be used to deal with retail decline, implications for policy-making and reflected on the use of the data collection and analysis methods in the context of small to medium towns.

A Obra “Faça-você-mesmo”: Estética da Participação nas Artes Digitais

A presente dissertação de doutoramento propõe-se a analisar criticamente a noção de obra de arte participativa, traduzida pela designação de obra “faça-você- -mesmo”, que apela à participação ativa e ao agenciamento do público que se tornam parte integrante do processo criativo engendrado pela obra. A nossa reflexão sobre a obra “faça-você-mesmo” insere-se no contexto da “cultura da participação” e da expansão dos media sociais e tem como principal objeto de estudo a obra participativa nas artes digitais. Esta tese postula uma análise das práticas participativas nas artes digitais à luz de uma genealogia artística e crítica que atravessa o século XX e é marcada pela experimentação com a ativação do público e a abertura da obra, traduzindo-se numa instabilização de limites entre arte, quotidiano e sociedade. A nossa abordagem metodológica enraíza-se numa tradição de pensamento crítico e interdisciplinar próprio das humanidades sendo que recorremos à articulação entre teoria crítica e análise de casos concretos. Assim, de modo a compreender a experiência do público com a obra participativa, elaborámos um conjunto de conceitos que nos permitem conceber uma estética da participação nas artes digitais. Paralelamente, de forma a conhecermos o universo temático das práticas participativas nas artes digitais, criámos uma proposta de três linhas temáticas no âmbito das quais analisámos múltiplas obras concretas, colocando-as em relação com os seus contextos sociais, culturais e políticos. As obras “faça-você-mesmo”, descritas nesta dissertação, tendem a situar-se numa posição intermédia entre os dois extremos das práticas artísticas autónomas “auto- -reflexivas” e dos projetos artísticos comunitários, que visam facilitar discussões e sugerir soluções para problemas concretos. Algumas das obras participativas discutidas neste estudo possuem caraterísticas em comum com a atitude “faça-você-mesmo” preconizada por determinadas formas de ativismo político, nomeadamente, a organização não-hierárquica, a autonomia e a participação direta dos voluntários. Ao convocar a participação do público, a obra “faça-você-mesmo” constitui-se como um projeto dialógico de experimentação criativa que se pode articular com uma dimensão política. Porém, este estudo salienta que a obra de arte participativa deve ser vista à luz de uma tensão entre disrupção e incorporação, liberdade e controlo que carateriza a dinâmica das redes digitais e do capitalismo contemporâneo. A presente dissertação propõe de modo fundamentado três linhas de investigação futura. Primeiramente, a exploração do campo das práticas curatoriais e museológicas em ambientes participativos. Seguidamente, a análise do modo como o campo da arte contemporânea e a condição do artista vão evoluir sob a influência do acesso generalizado aos meios de produção e distribuição artística nomeadamente através da World Wide Web. Por fim, o estudo dos novos regimes de interação e expressividade das imagens nas redes digitais.

O contrato de Project Finance

Currently, Angola portrays a notorious economic growth and due to recent innovative legislations, it has become the major investment attracting pole, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, having, thus, an extraordinary potentiality for a rapid and sustainable development, likely to place her in outstanding positions in the world economic ranking. Yet, such economic growth entails demanding levels of intensive investment in infrastructure, what has been reported of the Angolan Government to be unable to respond to, save if recurring to very high index of external debt, poisoning, in this way, the future budgeting of the country. Due to these infrastructure investment shortages, the cost of production remains highly onerous and the cost of life extremely unaffordable. On this account, the current study disserts about the contract of Project Finance; an alternative finance resource given as a viable solution for the private financing of infrastructure, aiming to demonstrate that such contractual figure, likewise the experience of several emerging economies and others, is a contract bid framework to take into account in today’s world. It refers to a financing technique – through which the Government may satisfy a common need (for example, the construction of a public domain or public servicing), without having to pay neither offer any collateral – based on a complex legal-financial engineering, arranged throughout a coalition of typical and atypical agreements, whereby it is mandatory to look back at the basic concepts of corporate law. More than just a simple financial study, the dissertation at stake analyses the nature and legal framework of Project Finance, which is a legally atypical and innominate contract, concluding that there is a relevant need for regulating and devoting a special legal regime in the Angolan jurisdiction for this promising legal form in the contemporary corporate finance world.

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value.

Cidadania pós-nacional

In the midst of changes of the world political order fostered mainly by the very debated phenomenon of globalization, the nation-state is confronted with new paradigms regarding their identification with society. Citizenship, as was defined up to the latter decades of the last century, rooted in nationalist ideals that tend to condition it full exercise on exclusionary policies oriented criteria, is not consistent with the human needs of present days. One can observe, mainly in Europe with the establishment of European citizenship, certain propensity towards a relative detachment between nationality and citizenship. It is expected with the present research to expose some of the arguments invoked by those who defend the possibility of a post-national conception of citizenship, i.e., decoupled from the concept of nationality and national boundaries, in order to develop a grounding for a necessary re-articulation of this institute. This assumption is based mainly on the movement of universal human rights and the revaluation of human dignity, especially through participatory policies on citizenship and respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.

Valuing an offshore exploration project through real options analysis

This thesis applied real options analysis to the valuation of an offshore oil exploration project, taking into consideration the several options typically faced by the management team of these projects. The real options process is developed under technical and price uncertainties, where it is considered that the mean reversion stochastic process is more adequate to describe the movement of oil price throught time. The valuation is realized to two case scenarios, being the first a simplified approach to develop the intuition of the used concepts, and the later a more complete cases that is resolved using both the binomial and trinomial processes to describe oil price movement. Real options methodology demonstrated to be capable of assessing and valuing the projects options, and of overcoming common capital budgeting methodologies flexibility limitation. The added value of the application of real options is evident, but so is the method's increased complexity, which adversely influence its widespread implementation.

A documentação pedagógica no trabalho de projeto: relato de uma experiência em contexto de jardim-de-infância

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Educação Pré-Escolar e Ensino do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico

Escola, democracia e autonomia: uma análise das políticas e práticas no cotidiano escolar

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Educação - Especialidade em Política Educativa

Relação entre coordenação motora e comportamento sedentário, em crianças

Relatório de atividade profissional de mestrado em Ensino de Educação Física nos Ensinos Básico e Secundário

Educação para a sustentabilidade: O uso de Sistemas de Informação Geográfica Participativos como instrumento de participação de crianças e adolescentes na construção de sociedades mais sustentáveis

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Educação (Área de Conhecimento: Educação ambiental e para a Sustentabilidade)

Estudos da criança e pesquisa com crianças: nuances luso-brasileiras acerca dos desafios éticos e metodológicos

O presente artigo discute as maneiras como os Estudos da Criança colaboram com as novas formas de se pensarem as crianças e as infâncias, afirmando que os conceitos de criança como ator social, como sujeito com direitos, participativo e com voz, passam a ter uma visibilidade significativa na pesquisa com crianças, nos discursos acadêmicos e também em muitas práticas sociais com crianças. Questionamos ao longo do texto alguns aspectos que têm vindo a merecer uma atenção acrescida nos últimos tempos, nomeadamente os relacionados com os preceitos éticos que envolvem a pesquisa com crianças tentando pensar de que modo podem concretizar-se numa ética viável e significativa para as crianças, nas pesquisas com crianças desenvolvidas no Brasil e em Portugal. Fechamos o texto com a convicção de que somente ouvindo e escutando o que as crianças tem a nos dizer sobre os seus modos de vida poderemos acrescentar ao conhecimento sobre a infância elementos inovadores e respeitadores da imagem da criança como sujeito ativo de direitos. Somente desta forma conseguiremos enfrentar as exigências de colocar em discussão todo e qualquer direito das crianças na pesquisa em debates mais extensos de ampliação da cidadania.

Viver a (e para) aprender: uma intervenção-ação para a promoção do envelhecimento ativo

A intervenção aqui descrita teve como objetivo contribuir para o envelhecimento ativo de usuários de centros-dia/convívio para idosos, desenvolvendo harmoniosamente todas suas dimensões, visando que os utentes fossem autônomos, participativos e ativos. Recorrendo ao paradigma interpretativo-hermenêutico, apoiamo-nos num trabalho de investigação-ação participativa, construído e implementado em dois centros-dia/convívio do conselho da Póvoa de Lanhoso, distrito de Braga, Portugal, e que contou com um total de 25 usuários: 12 no centro de convívio A e 13 no centro de convívio B. O objetivo foi transversal a todas as atividades implementadas, tendo sido alcançado como revelam os resultados satisfatórios obtidos na avaliação da intervenção (e de cada uma das atividades). A avaliação contínua e final permitiu, igualmente, aferir que todas as atividades desenvolvidas foram do agrado dos usuários e que todas lhes possibilitaram novos conhecimentos que os ajudaram na sua vida diária, aumentando, consequentemente, sua qualidade de vida e tornando-os mais autônomos, participativos e ativos.

Getting Listeners Involved: Rádio Ás, a Community Web Project

[Excerpt] The idea of community is usually associated with radio today in the context of what Bart Cammaerts (2009,635) classifies as a "third type of broadcast, namely participatory radio, complementary to both commercial and public media". Following Ellie Rennie (2006, 3), community radio corresponds, as all other forms of community media, to non-profit media that provide "community members with an opportunity to participate in the production process". For the International Association for Media and Communication Research, which supports a research group on Community Communication, this area includes media that originate from, circulate and resonate with the sphere of civil society.