Gov 2.0: Towards a User Generated State?

New elements associated withWeb 2.0 relating to interactivity and end-user focus have combined with the availability of newlevels of information to encourage the development of what may be termed a Gov 2.0 approach.This, in combination with recent initiatives in the modernising government programme, has emphasised new levels of public participation and engagement with government as well as a re-engineering of public services tomake them more responsive to their end users. Adopting a governmentality perspective, it is argued that this involves a wider process of governing through constructing and reconstructing ideas of the public, community and individual citizen-consumers who take on a role in their own governance. It is argued that this fundamental re-working of the nature of what is public represents a constitutional change that is perhaps more signi¢cant than the constitutional reform programme directed to formal government which attracts more attention

'Like walking on eggshells': Service user views and expectations of the child protection system

This paper reports on a study of service users' views on Irish child protection services. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 67 service users, including young people between 13 and 23. The findings showed that despite refocusing and public service management reforms, service users still experience involvement with the services as intimidating and stressful and while they acknowledged opportunities to participate in the child protection process, they found the experience to be very difficult. Their definition of ‘needs’ was somewhat at odds with that suggested in official documentation, and they viewed the execution of a child protection plan more as a coercive requirement to comply with ‘tasks’ set by workers than a conjoint effort to enhance their children's welfare. As in previous studies, the data showed how the development of good relationships between workers and service users could compensate for the harsher aspects of involvement with child protection. In addition, this study demonstrated a high level of discernment on the part of service users, highlighting their expectation of quality standards in respect of courtesy, respect, accountability, transparency and practitioner expertise.

User perspective on palliative care services: experiences of middle-aged partners bereaved through cancer known to social work services in Northern Ireland

This qualitative research study explores experiences of partners bereaved through cancer, who were resident in an urban area of Northern Ireland and who had been service users of the social work services. Data were collected in 2004 from 10 individuals who participated in semi-structured interviews. Emergent themes were identified using thematic content analysis and findings analysed under four categories: cancer journey; impact of bereavement; process of adjustment and change; and experience of support services. Opportunities to facilitate communication were not always maximised, often resulting in poor bereavement outcomes. Although hospices undertook bereavement risk assessment, participants were unaware of its use and queried its accuracy without service user involvement. The most cited informal support was family and friends, although such help was time-limited. Service user feedback regarding social workers was generally positive; however, there was a lack of knowledge about their role in palliative care. Post-bereavement adjustment was influenced by the quality of social networks, the responsibilities of lone parenthood, and challenges to life values and core beliefs. A framework for palliative care social work has been recommended based on research findings.

Service User and Carer Involvement in Role-Plays to Assess Readiness for Practice

Service user and carer involvement in social work education is now well established since its inception as a compulsory requirement in the social work curriculum in the United Kingdom in 2003. Since then, there have been many examples of how such involvement has been approached by education providers. Nevertheless, one of the key obstacles and challenges in this field continues to centre on the need to achieve non-tokenistic user involvement which cements the engagement of service users and carers at the heart of social work education. This paper describes one such initiative where service user and carer colleagues in a university in Northern Ireland have been actively involved in the assessment of first year social work students’ preparation for their first period of practice learning. The paper presents the background to this initiative explaining how the project unfolded; the detailed preparations that were involved and the evidence gathered from evaluations undertaken with the students, service users and carers, and academic colleagues who were all involved. We believe that the findings from this project can contribute to the advancement of existing knowledge in the field in exploring and recommending creative methodologies for user involvement in social work education.

Cache-Integrated Network Interfaces: Flexible On-Chip Communication and Synchronization for Large-Scale CMPs

Per-core scratchpad memories (or local stores) allow direct inter-core communication, with latency and energy advantages over coherent cache-based communication, especially as CMP architectures become more distributed. We have designed cache-integrated network interfaces, appropriate for scalable multicores, that combine the best of two worlds – the flexibility of caches and the efficiency of scratchpad memories: on-chip SRAM is configurably shared among caching, scratchpad, and virtualized network interface (NI) functions. This paper presents our architecture, which provides local and remote scratchpad access, to either individual words or multiword blocks through RDMA copy. Furthermore, we introduce event responses, as a technique that enables software configurable communication and synchronization primitives. We present three event response mechanisms that expose NI functionality to software, for multiword transfer initiation, completion notifications for software selected sets of arbitrary size transfers, and multi-party synchronization queues. We implemented these mechanisms in a four-core FPGA prototype, and measure the logic overhead over a cache-only design for basic NI functionality to be less than 20%. We also evaluate the on-chip communication performance on the prototype, as well as the performance of synchronization functions with simulation of CMPs with up to 128 cores. We demonstrate efficient synchronization, low-overhead communication, and amortized-overhead bulk transfers, which allow parallelization gains for fine-grain tasks, and efficient exploitation of the hardware bandwidth.