Civic Apps Competition Handbook


Book Description

Organize a Civic Apps Competition (CAC) in your city. This practical guide provides best practices for each phase of the process, based largely on the authors’ firsthand experience planning and managing Apps for Metro Chicago (A4MC). You’ll learn everything from setting goals and creating a budget to running the competition and measuring the outcome. CACs provide software programmers with platforms for building effective apps, using open government data as a way to foster community involvement and make government more transparent. This handbook helps you address serious questions about the process and shows you what’s required for making your competition successful. Gain insights from the authors’ survey of 15 CACs in the US and Canada Get guidelines for establishing specific goals, and evaluate results with reliable metrics Understand major costs involved and build a budget around partners and sponsors Determine participation incentives, prize categories, and judging Avoid unstructured data sets by being selective when choosing public datasets Learn how the authors handled roadblocks during the A4MC competition Discover ways to sustain lasting community interest once the CAC is over




Civic Apps Competition Handbook


Book Description

Organize a Civic Apps Competition (CAC) in your city. This practical guide provides best practices for each phase of the process, based largely on the authors’ firsthand experience planning and managing Apps for Metro Chicago (A4MC). You’ll learn everything from setting goals and creating a budget to running the competition and measuring the outcome. CACs provide software programmers with platforms for building effective apps, using open government data as a way to foster community involvement and make government more transparent. This handbook helps you address serious questions about the process and shows you what’s required for making your competition successful. Gain insights from the authors’ survey of 15 CACs in the US and Canada Get guidelines for establishing specific goals, and evaluate results with reliable metrics Understand major costs involved and build a budget around partners and sponsors Determine participation incentives, prize categories, and judging Avoid unstructured data sets by being selective when choosing public datasets Learn how the authors handled roadblocks during the A4MC competition Discover ways to sustain lasting community interest once the CAC is over




Civic Engagement and Politics: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications


Book Description

Creating transparency between government and citizens through outreach and engagement initiatives is critical to promoting community development and is also an essential part of a democratic society. This can be achieved through a number of methods including public policy, urban development, artistic endeavors, and digital platforms. Civic Engagement and Politics: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines civic engagement practices in social, political, and non-political contexts. As the world is now undergoing a transformation, interdisciplinary collaboration, participation, community-based participatory research, partnerships, and co-creation have become more common than focused domains. Highlighting a range of topics such as social media and politics, civic activism, and public administration, this multi-volume book is geared toward government officials, leaders, practitioners, policymakers, academicians, and researchers interested in active citizen participation and politics.







Citizen’s Right to the Digital City


Book Description

Edited by thought leaders in the fields of urban informatics and urban interaction design, this book brings together case studies and examples from around the world to discuss the role that urban interfaces, citizen action, and city making play in the quest to create and maintain not only secure and resilient, but productive, sustainable and viable urban environments. The book debates the impact of these trends on theory, policy and practice. The individual chapters are based on blind peer reviewed contributions by leading researchers working at the intersection of the social / cultural, technical / digital, and physical / spatial domains of urbanism scholarship. The book will appeal not only to researchers and students, but also to a vast number of practitioners in the private and public sector interested in accessible content that clearly and rigorously analyses the potential offered by urban interfaces, mobile technology, and location-based services in the context of engaging people with open, smart and participatory urban environments.




From Russia with Code


Book Description

While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world. Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich




The Legislature of Brazil


Book Description

This book develops a critical analysis of the Brazilian legislature, specifically the role of its lower chamber, the Chamber of Deputies, in policy making and how this combines with its public engagement role, namely in terms of promoting participation and transparency. The book draws from Nelson Polsby’s theoretical conceptualization about transformative and arena legislatures. The purpose is not to reach a consensus about the exact categorisation of the legislature in Polsby’s classification. On the contrary, the chapters are mainly concerned in challenging this classification through interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from within the legislative studies in Brazil. The book’s first chapters introduce the reader to an historical overview of the Brazilian legislature’s policy making and organization, identifying its role in proposing public policies and scrutinising proposals from the Executive Branch. The subsequent chapters focus on its public engagement role and address contemporary elements – such as political participation and transparency – and how these interlink, or not, with legislative practices and influence the production of law. The book provides a unique insight into the operation and power of the legislature of a key global power, Brazil, in a presidential political system context. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Legislative Studies.




Data Mining For Dummies


Book Description

Delve into your data for the key to success Data mining is quickly becoming integral to creating value and business momentum. The ability to detect unseen patterns hidden in the numbers exhaustively generated by day-to-day operations allows savvy decision-makers to exploit every tool at their disposal in the pursuit of better business. By creating models and testing whether patterns hold up, it is possible to discover new intelligence that could change your business's entire paradigm for a more successful outcome. Data Mining for Dummies shows you why it doesn't take a data scientist to gain this advantage, and empowers average business people to start shaping a process relevant to their business's needs. In this book, you'll learn the hows and whys of mining to the depths of your data, and how to make the case for heavier investment into data mining capabilities. The book explains the details of the knowledge discovery process including: Model creation, validity testing, and interpretation Effective communication of findings Available tools, both paid and open-source Data selection, transformation, and evaluation Data Mining for Dummies takes you step-by-step through a real-world data-mining project using open-source tools that allow you to get immediate hands-on experience working with large amounts of data. You'll gain the confidence you need to start making data mining practices a routine part of your successful business. If you're serious about doing everything you can to push your company to the top, Data Mining for Dummies is your ticket to effective data mining.




The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies


Book Description

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today.




Model Rules of Professional Conduct


Book Description

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.