About Collaboration, Interaction, and the Negotiation of Meaning in Synchronous Written Chats in L2-German

Open Access

A Resource Centric Approach For Advancing Collaboration Through Hydrologic Data And Model Sharing

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop or perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing model instances as necessary. Scientists may also publish outcomes (data, results or models) into HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform for sharing data, models and analyses. HydroShare is expanding the data sharing capability of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System by broadening the classes of data accommodated, creating new capability to share models and model components, and taking advantage of emerging social media functionality to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. One of the fundamental concepts in HydroShare is that of a Resource. All content is represented using a Resource Data Model that separates system and science metadata and has elements common to all resources as well as elements specific to the types of resources HydroShare will support. These will include different data types used in the hydrology community and models and workflows that require metadata on execution functionality. The HydroShare web interface and social media functions are being developed using the Drupal content management system. A geospatial visualization and analysis component enables searching, visualizing, and analyzing geographic datasets. The integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) is being used to manage federated data content and perform rule-based background actions on data and model resources, including parsing to generate metadata catalog information and the execution of models and workflows. This presentation will introduce the HydroShare functionality developed to date, describe key elements of the Resource Data Model and outline the roadmap for future development.

An Environmental Analysis Corroborating PDA and the Winthrop Example

Libraries seek active ways to innovate amidst macroeconomic shifts, growing online education to help alleviate ever-growing schedule conflicts as students juggle jobs and course schedules, as well as changing business models in publishing and evolving information technologies. Patron-driven acquisition (PDA), also known as demand-driven acquisition (DDA), offers numerous strengths in supporting university curricula in the context of these significant shifts. PDA is a business model centered on short-term loans and subsequent purchases of ebooks resulting directly from patrons' natural use stemming from their discovery of the ebooks in library catalogs where the ebooks' bibliographic records are loaded at regular intervals established between the library and ebook supplier. Winthrop University's PDA plan went live in October 2011, and this article chronicles the philosophical and operational considerations, the in-library collaboration, and technical preparations in concert with the library system vendor and ebook supplier. Short-term loan is invoked after a threshold is crossed, typically number of pages or time spent in the ebook. After a certain number of short-term loans negotiated between the library and ebook supplier, the next short-term loan becomes an automatic purchase after which the library owns the ebook in perpetuity. Purchasing options include single-user and multi-user licenses. Owing to high levels of need in college and university environments, Winthrop chose the multi-user license as the preferred default purchase. Only where multi-user licenses are unavailable does the automatic purchase occur with single-user title licenses. Data on initial use between October 2011 and February 2013 reveal that of all PDA ebooks viewed, only 30% crossed the threshold into short-term loans. Of all triggered short-term loans, Psychology was the highest-using. Of all ebook views too brief to trigger short-term loans, Business was the highest-using area. Although the data are still too young to draw conclusions after only a few months, thought-provoking usage differences between academic disciplines have begun to emerge. These differences should be considered in library plans for the best possible curricular support for each academic program. As higher education struggles with costs and course-delivery methods libraries have an enduring lead role.

Using Technology to Increase Collaboration Between the Library, Teaching Faculty, and the Campus at Large

This article outlines many different ways of using technology to better link academic librarians and faculty, focusing particularly on how the appropriate use of technology in Acquisitions can improve the image of the library. The article presents a comprehensive overview of how technologies can be used to make Acquisitions not just a book purchasing department, but a department that works proactively to impress consituents, helping to make the library a central and prestigious part of the campus community. While the article's primary focus is on academic libraries, much of the discussion is also applicable to other types of libraries.

Collaboration Is the New Black

Orange may be the new black, but as I have seen only five minutes of that show, I can’t really use it here. Besides, based on the five minutes I saw, I would assume it is a series written by males. Not since the Victoria’s Secret catalog have I seen so many women wearing fewer clothes, or engaging in so many unmentionable acts. I’ll stop there because my Victorianism is showing, I’m sure.

A Framework supporting collaboration on the distributed design of integrated systems

The work described in this thesis aims to support the distributed design of integrated systems and considers specifically the need for collaborative interaction among designers. Particular emphasis was given to issues which were only marginally considered in previous approaches, such as the abstraction of the distribution of design automation resources over the network, the possibility of both synchronous and asynchronous interaction among designers and the support for extensible design data models. Such issues demand a rather complex software infrastructure, as possible solutions must encompass a wide range of software modules: from user interfaces to middleware to databases. To build such structure, several engineering techniques were employed and some original solutions were devised. The core of the proposed solution is based in the joint application of two homonymic technologies: CAD Frameworks and object-oriented frameworks. The former concept was coined in the late 80's within the electronic design automation community and comprehends a layered software environment which aims to support CAD tool developers, CAD administrators/integrators and designers. The latter, developed during the last decade by the software engineering community, is a software architecture model to build extensible and reusable object-oriented software subsystems. In this work, we proposed to create an object-oriented framework which includes extensible sets of design data primitives and design tool building blocks. Such object-oriented framework is included within a CAD Framework, where it plays important roles on typical CAD Framework services such as design data representation and management, versioning, user interfaces, design management and tool integration. The implemented CAD Framework - named Cave2 - followed the classical layered architecture presented by Barnes, Harrison, Newton and Spickelmier, but the possibilities granted by the use of the object-oriented framework foundations allowed a series of improvements which were not available in previous approaches: - object-oriented frameworks are extensible by design, thus this should be also true regarding the implemented sets of design data primitives and design tool building blocks. This means that both the design representation model and the software modules dealing with it can be upgraded or adapted to a particular design methodology, and that such extensions and adaptations will still inherit the architectural and functional aspects implemented in the object-oriented framework foundation; - the design semantics and the design visualization are both part of the object-oriented framework, but in clearly separated models. This allows for different visualization strategies for a given design data set, which gives collaborating parties the flexibility to choose individual visualization settings; - the control of the consistency between semantics and visualization - a particularly important issue in a design environment with multiple views of a single design - is also included in the foundations of the object-oriented framework. Such mechanism is generic enough to be also used by further extensions of the design data model, as it is based on the inversion of control between view and semantics. The view receives the user input and propagates such event to the semantic model, which evaluates if a state change is possible. If positive, it triggers the change of state of both semantics and view. Our approach took advantage of such inversion of control and included an layer between semantics and view to take into account the possibility of multi-view consistency; - to optimize the consistency control mechanism between views and semantics, we propose an event-based approach that captures each discrete interaction of a designer with his/her respective design views. The information about each interaction is encapsulated inside an event object, which may be propagated to the design semantics - and thus to other possible views - according to the consistency policy which is being used. Furthermore, the use of event pools allows for a late synchronization between view and semantics in case of unavailability of a network connection between them; - the use of proxy objects raised significantly the abstraction of the integration of design automation resources, as either remote or local tools and services are accessed through method calls in a local object. The connection to remote tools and services using a look-up protocol also abstracted completely the network location of such resources, allowing for resource addition and removal during runtime; - the implemented CAD Framework is completely based on Java technology, so it relies on the Java Virtual Machine as the layer which grants the independence between the CAD Framework and the operating system. All such improvements contributed to a higher abstraction on the distribution of design automation resources and also introduced a new paradigm for the remote interaction between designers. The resulting CAD Framework is able to support fine-grained collaboration based on events, so every single design update performed by a designer can be propagated to the rest of the design team regardless of their location in the distributed environment. This can increase the group awareness and allow a richer transfer of experiences among them, improving significantly the collaboration potential when compared to previously proposed file-based or record-based approaches. Three different case studies were conducted to validate the proposed approach, each one focusing one a subset of the contributions of this thesis. The first one uses the proxy-based resource distribution architecture to implement a prototyping platform using reconfigurable hardware modules. The second one extends the foundations of the implemented object-oriented framework to support interface-based design. Such extensions - design representation primitives and tool blocks - are used to implement a design entry tool named IBlaDe, which allows the collaborative creation of functional and structural models of integrated systems. The third case study regards the possibility of integration of multimedia metadata to the design data model. Such possibility is explored in the frame of an online educational and training platform.

Gestão de risco em cadeia de suprimentos global: um estudo multicasos entre os membros da cadeia da manga

O propósito deste estudo é compreender como os diferentes membros gerenciam o risco na cadeia de suprimentos global. Por meio de um estudo multicaso na cadeia de exportação da manga brasileira para os Estados Unidos foram investigados os elos fornecedor, exportador, operador logístico e importador. Foi desenvolvido um protocolo de pesquisa conforme sugestão de Yin (2010) e adaptação de instrumento de coleta de dados semi-estruturado de Christopher, et al. (2011). A partir de entrevistas com organizações de apoio ao objeto da pesquisa, foi selecionado a amostra de empresas nas quais o fenômeno de gestão do risco poderia ser melhor observado. Baseado nas classificações de tipo de risco elaboradas por Christopher et al. (2011), é sugerida uma nova organização das categorias de risco (demanda, suprimentos, processo e controle, ambiental e sustentabilidade). Este trabalho apresenta uma descrição da cadeia de exportação de manga, bem como os principais riscos e as estratégias mitigadoras de risco empregadas pelos quatro membros da cadeia estudados. Conforme regra de Sousa (2001), foram realizadas comparações entre os tipos de risco e estratégias mitigadoras observadas na cadeia de suprimentos. Por fim, o estudo mostrou que a gestão do risco é heterogenia entre os membros da cadeia, o exportador é o mais penalizado pela consequência de risco à cadeia e a colaboração é a principal forma observada de mitigação.

Creating buyer-supplier commitment in food supply chains at the base of the pyramid

Esta pesquisa analisa o papel dos aspectos relacionais tais como confiança, comprometimento, interdependência e uso de poder âmbito das estratégias de negócios inclusivos que envolvem pequenos agricultores nas cadeias de valor de multinacionais dos agronegócios no Brasil. Os negócios inclusivos de abastecimento direto por empresas com pequenos agricultores em países em desenvolvimento têm sido reconhecidos como uma abordagem economicamente viavél e promissora para criar impacto social e melhorar as condições de vida de produtores rurais da "base da pirâmide", ao mesmo tempo permitindo que as empresas reforçar as suas posições nos mercados locais e adquirir matérias primas de qualidade a custos mais baixos. Estudos sobre este tema focam amplamente sobre as vantagens comerciais e competitivas que as empresas derivam do abastecimento direito com pequenos fornecedores, apresentando modelos de cadeia de valor customizados e ajustados estratégias globais de negócios, no entanto ainda há pouco conhecimento teoricamente fundamentado sobre os desafios organizacionais e relacionais da relação entre o comprador multinacional e o fornecedor de baixa renda. Além disso, pouco foco tem-se prestado sobre como assimetrias entre multinacionais e produtores de baixa renda, em questão de poder, dependência e de valores pode afetar a evolução dessas relações de negócios. O objetivo do estudo foi descrever os fatores que permitem a esses parceiros assimétricos de construir relacionamentos comerciais de longo prazo e mutuamente benéficos. A metodologia da teoria fundamentada foi usada e foi particularmente adequada para examinar as relações entre comprador e fornecedor e para recolher experiências de campo em três setores principais dominados pela agricultura familiar no Brasil, ou seja laticínios, avi-suinocultura e produção hortícola. Os principais conceitos teóricos da área de Relationship Marketing foram usados para apoiar os resultados da pesquisa de campo. A principal conclusão desta pesquisa é a importância de ir além da construção de confiança na estratégia de gestão do relacionamento entre comprador e fornecedor e de criar parcerias diádicas baseadas na interdependência mútua, a fim de reduzir as assimetrias e melhorar o comprometimento entre a empresa e o pequeno agricultor.

The role of law and public-private collaboration in promoting innovative firms in Brazil: the case of the BNDES and the “criatec fund”

This paper presents the result of a qualitative empirical research about the “Criatec Fund”, a venture capital fund, privately managed and directed to innovative firms, that was created in 2007 by the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). The paper discusses the role of law in the implementation of the Criatec Fund in three different legal dimensions: structural, regulatory and contractual. Based on interviews, this paper tries to test some hypothesis previously formulated by some scholars that studied new financial policies created by the BNDES. This study explains the institutional arrangements of this seed capital policy and the role of flexible legal instruments in the execution of this peculiar type of publicprivate partnership. It also poses some questions to the “law and development agenda” based on some insights from the economic sociology of law.

Decision of using local supplier as a CSR strategy: drivers and benefits for large international companies

A pesquisa aqui apresentada é uma análise detalhada de estratégias de compra associados à Responsabilidade Social Corporativa das empresas multinacionais e visa identificar os elementos que influenciam na escolha de fornecedores locais e os benefícios que tais estratégias podem trazer a estas empresas. A globalização e a pressão por melhores produtos e menores custos levam empresas a repensarem suas decisões de sourcing. Selecionar competências, recursos e ainda escolher onde comprar ou terceirizar, tornou-se uma decisão estratégica fundamental, e muitas multinacionais optam por usar fornecedores locais como um diferencial e uma plataforma de criação de valor para a empresa e para a sociedade. Enquanto esta abordagem reforça a posição de mercado e garante matérias-primas de qualidade a preços justos, o relacionamento com estes fornecedores traz desenvolvimento econômico e social para as comunidades subdesenvolvidas. Estudos sobre fornecedores locais geralmente focam em vantagens competitivas para as empresas, e na adaptação de cadeias de valor para atender estratégias globais de negócios, no entanto, a difusão do conhecimento sobre a criação de valor compartilhado é ainda limitada. Assim, o objetivo desta pesquisa foi identificar os aspectos de estratégia corporativa, gestão de fornecedores e colaboração que influenciam na criação de valor compartilhado. Dois estudos de casos foram expostos em uma pesquisa qualitativa exploratória com o propósito de avaliar iniciativas que tiveram como base o relacionamento com os fornecedores locais. A análise foi separada em três etapas com o objetivo de identificar (1) influências nas decisões de seleção de fornecedores, (2) aspectos que levam ao sucesso da gestão de fornecedores, e (3) o valor gerado como resultado destas decisões. Conceitos teóricos da CSR, SCM, colaboração e criação de valor compartilhado foram utilizados para apoiar os resultados e as principais conclusões. O resultado da pesquisa revelou que a idéia de co-criação de valor faz parte da cultura da empresa e pode ser considerado um dos motivos pelos quais multinacionais decidem usar fornecedores locais. Contudo, mesmo integrados na estratégia, não garantem criação efetiva de valor compartilhado e diversos componentes em uma estratégia de compras que representam responsabilidade social corporativa devem ser ajustados para motivar mudanças significativas. Ainda, vale lembrar que os elementos de colaboração, tais como a transparência e independência são vitais para melhorar o compromisso entre a multinacional e os negócios locais e criar valor compartilhado.

Is what you say what you do? Analyzing and comparing the effect of buyer-supplier relationship in the Brazilian and Chinese supplier selection criteria

Choosing properly and efficiently a supplier has been challenging practitioners and academics since 1960’s. Since then, countless studies had been performed and relevant changes in the business scenario were considered such as global sourcing, quality-orientation, just-in-time practices. It is almost consensus that quality should be the selection driver, however, some polemical findings questioned this general agreement. Therefore, one of the objectives of the study was to identify the supplier selection criteria and bring this discussion back again. Moreover, Dickson (1966) suggested existing business relationship as selection criterion, then it was reviewed the importance of business relationship for the company and noted a set of potential negative effects that could rise from it. By considering these side effects of relationship, this research aimed to investigate how the relationship could influence the supplier selection and how its harmful effects could affect the selection process. The impact of this phenomenon was investigated cross-nationally. The research strategy adopted was a controlled experiment via vignette combined with discrete choice analysis. The data collections were performed in China and Brazil. By examining the results, it could be drawn five major findings. First, when purchasers were asked to declare their supplier selection priorities, quality was stated as the most important independently of country and relationship. This result was consistent with diverse studies since 60’s. However, when purchasers were exposed to a multi-criteria trade-off situation, their actual selection priorities deviate from what they had declared. In the actual decision-making without influence of buyer-supplier relationship, Brazilian purchasers focused on price and Chinese buyers prioritized delivery then price. This observation reinforced some controversial prior studies of Verma & Pullman (1998) and Hirakubo & Kublin (1998). Second, through the introduction of the buyer-supplier relationship (operationalized via relational capital) in the supplier selection process, this research extended the existing studies and found that Brazilian buyers still focused on price. The relationship became just another criterion for supplier selection such as quality and delivery. However, from the Chinese sample, the results suggested that quality was totally discarded and the decision was majorly made through price and relationship. The third finding suggested that relational capital could legitimate the quality and sustainability of the supplier and replaces these selection criteria and made the decisional task less complex. Additionally, with the relational capital, the decision-makings were associated to few biases such as availability cognition, commitment, confirmatory and perceived biases. By analyzing the purchasers’ behavior, relational capital inducted buyers of both countries to relax in their purchasing requirements (quality, delivery and sustainability) leading to potential negative effects. In the Brazilian sample, the phenomenon of willing to pay a higher price for a lower quality offer demonstrated to be a potential counterproductive and suboptimal decision. Finally, the last finding was associated to the cultural effect on the buyers’ decisions. From the outcome, it is possible to observe that if a purchaser’s cultural background is more relation-oriented, the more he will tend to use relational capital as a decision heuristic, thus, the purchaser will be more susceptible to the potential relationship’s side effects

Intrinsic and relational perspectives of relationship value: an integrated framework in buyer-supplier relationships

O relacionamento entre firmas vem sendo estudado como um fator que amplia os limites do valor criado pelas firmas individualmente, por meio da construção conjunta de benefícios que não poderia ocorrer caso o relacionamento não se estabelecesse. O valor total criado no nível da díade, que é capturado pelas partes, é o valor do relacionamento. Os benefícios obtidos transcendem as características financeiras da transação, podendo converter-se em outros aspectos da relação entre as firmas, tais como capacitação técnica, oferta de serviços, capacidade de inovação e reputação. Os recursos compartilhados e trocados entre as partes são fontes de criação de valor no relacionamento, mas originam-se de duas perspectivas diferentes. Eles podem pertencer previamente a uma delas, compondo um valor que é intrínseco, ou desenvolverem-se ao longo do relacionamento em si, resultando numa parcela de valor relacional. Neste contexto, este estudo propõe-se a investigar as diferentes características das partes que são fonte de criação de valor em um relacionamento, bem como analisar os aspectos que influenciam sua captura pelas partes. O estudo envolveu três etapas. A primeira, de cunho teórico, visou a explorar as dimensões do valor do relacionamento, no que se refere à sua definição e suas fontes. As duas etapas seguintes objetivaram testar empiricamente o efeito das fontes do valor do relacionamento na criação e captura de valor, por meio de uma survey transversal e um estudo de casos múltiplos. A perspectiva teórica que permeia o estudo é a Visão Baseada em Recursos, uma vez que ela pressupõe que os recursos das firmas produzem valor econômico que transcende os limites delas e é capturado por seus clientes e fornecedores. A abordagem ontológica é a do realismo crítico, a qual permite um melhor entendimento dos acontecimentos empiricamente observados. Os resultados contribuem para um melhor entendimento teórico sobre valor do relacionamento, uma vez que os construtos de valor intrínseco e valor relacional integram diferentes fontes de benefícios que podem advir de relacionamentos. A relação entre esses construtos e sua influência individual na captura de valor também trazem uma contribuição teórica ao estudo de relacionamentos comprador-fornecedor. As principais contribuições gerenciais dizem respeito ao fato de que é possível capturar valor mesmo que o relacionamento não seja colaborativo. Adicionalmente, os resultados enfatizam que as empresas deveriam explorar mais como fazer para extrair mais benefícios da outra parte e do relacionamento em si, em especial de fontes não-financeiras.

Assessing the maturity levei of an organization in its adoption of collaboration technologies

Nowadays there are many information technologies that can make a significant difference to support collaborative efforts in the workspace. The role of IT is to support group collaboration by empowering team members with the right capabilities. One way to assess capabilities is through a maturity model. This paper proposes a first version of the Collaboration-Technology Maturity model (CTMM), aiming to serve as a strategic instrument for IT managers to control and manage the adoption of Collaboration Technologies (CITs) among their organizations. Our contribution is both theoretical and practical as we propose a descriptive maturity model. Nevertheless, it is also an application method and assessment instruments. We also completed an empirical evaluation by conducting 89 assessments at Latin American companies of all sizes and industries. This extensive field exercise allowed us to not only evaluate the usefulness of the model and instruments but also investigate CIT adoption patterns in Latin America in an attempt to collect historical data to further evolve CTMM into a comparative model. Responses were used to provide conclusions on CIT adoption in Latin America with respect to three specific backgrounds: the country of origin (region), size (in number of employees) and industry type. The implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers.

The dimensions of trust in interorganizational relationships: how buyer and supplier perspectives differ?

Apesar da pesquisa em confiança interorganizacional e sua relação com performance ter sido conduzida sob as perspectivas da Teoria de Custos de Transação, Teoria das Trocas Sociais e Canais de Marketing, três importantes lacunas na literatura requerem investigação. Primeiro, está em andamento um debate conceitual sobre a multi-dimensionalidade da confiança, e como ela deve ser operacionalizada e medida, e que se divide em três correntes de pensamento - um construto multidimensional definido por dimensões não dominantes, um construto baseado em duas dimensões dominantes (afetiva e calculativa), ou um construto unidimensional. Segundo, existe ambiguidade em como as dimensões da confiança são definidas, levando a artefatos de equivalência nas escalas e resultados contraditórios. Terceiro, as diferentes percepções que compradores e fornecedores podem ter em cada dimensão da confiança e seu impacto na performance logística ainda não estão claros. Esta pesquisa empírica examina a confiança nas relações entre compradores e fornecedores no setor de logística no Brasil, através de duas amostras e estudos independentes: um examina a percepção dos compradores e o outro examina a dos fornecedores. Em seguida, os dois estudos são comparados para determinar as diferentes perspectivas da confiança e as implicações na performance logística. A análise multivariada mostrou que a confiança parece estar presente nas relações interorganizacionais, e é a percepção do comprador que possui maior relação com a performance logística. Ao mesmo tempo, compradores percebem fornecedores de forma mais negativa nas dimensões mensuráveis (competência e performance), enquanto não foram encontradas diferenças nos aspectos sociais (honestidade e benevolência), o que pode ser resultado do ambiente e cultura pesquisados. As análises mostraram que, apesar da confiança poder ser definida como um construto multidimensional, ela deve ser operacionalizada como um construto unidimensional direcionado pela competência e credibilidade. Este estudo contribui para a prática sugerindo formas de aumentar a confiança interorganizacional para aumento da performance.

Relational value creation and appropriation in buyer supplier relationships

his paper bridges the gap between the buyer-supplier literature and the definition of competitive advantage as value creation found in the strategic management literature. This study proposes and tests an integrative definition of the relational value that is created and appropriated in a dyad