Four-Layered Structure of E-Government Systems

The structure of the e-government systems plays a vital role for provision of quality of e-services offered. These systems are quite complex deploying the most advanced technologies and developed and rich countries minimised this complexity with centralised systems. However, the less developed and countries with limited financial support are creating distributed and decentralised systems trying to keep the pace with more developed in provision of e-government services. The common identifier for both types of the systems is four-layered structure, which provides quality of service provision. This paper discusses the four-layered structure of e-government systems on cases of Estonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The four-layered structure was found as the quality solution for distributed and decentralised e-government systems.

INCELS ON REDDIT: A STUDY IN SOCIAL NORMS AND DECENTRALISED MODERATION

The social news website Reddit has a long history of hosting communities (‘subreddits’) that advocate or encourage white supremacy (Gillespie 2018), disparagement of minority groups (Topinka 2017), and violence against women (Massanari 2017). As a platform that relies heavily on volunteer moderators to self-govern the subreddits (Matias 2016), Reddit has been criticised for failing to adequately enforce its site-wide rules (Gillespie 2018). Incels—an internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs—grew in visibility when they developed subreddits on Reddit. After ongoing criticism and media attention about harmful behaviour of incels both on and off the platform, Reddit imposed escalating sanctions and ultimately banned the most visible of these subreddits over a period of several years. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between formal rules and social norms in incel and related subreddits. This paper aims to improve understanding about how problematic norms are contested in (partially-) decentralised systems of content moderation. We examine discourse about moderation to better understand the role of moderation teams in maintaining and changing social norms in their communities and to examine the interaction between these norms and both sitewide and subreddit-specific rules. Our analysis suggests that the threat of prohibition alone is unlikely to be sufficient to drive cultural change in problematic subreddits. We argue that content moderation is an insufficient frame to understand the regulation of harmful communities; real change requires addressing the underlying cultural norms rather than focusing on individual pieces of content.

The Australian industrial system in the era of COVID-19

COVID-19 caused sudden and serious damage to the Australian economy. The effects have been spread unevenly, and highlighted the shortcomings of over-reliance on insecure forms of work. The lack of any form of paid leave for casual and other insecure workers undermined the public health response, and was emblematic of the broader consequences of insecurity. Despite its limitations, Australia’s industrial relations system responded to the challenges of the pandemic in a way that less regulated and ‘decentralised’ systems would not have been able to. This article argues that the union movement was critical to Australia’s successful response, and that the award system proved to be an adaptable mechanism to deliver change at a national level while ensuring that the representative voice of workers was heard, and basic industrial protections were not jettisoned. Industry bargaining would have also been a beneficial tool to deal with economy-wide issues of this kind. The article urges that the lessons of the pandemic be learned as we move to a recovery phase and that we ensure there are more secure jobs, better bargaining rights and improvements to basic protections to ensure that workers’ rights are not eroded.

Investigating the dynamics of decentralised systems in US and encouraging local participation, engagement

There is growing awareness that a top-down approach, whereby decisions are made at an executive level and disseminated down, is not the only way to run companies and countries. Professor Soichiro Maeyama, Graduate School of Urban Management, Fukuyama City University, Japan, is applying his interest in decentralised systems and the potential connections with consciousness to investigate the social function of urban decentralisation in the US. The goal is to provide new perspectives on how local dynamics and governance can be formulated. Two important considerations for Maeyama and his team are citizen governance and how organisations can introduce innovations that can motivate staff members. His vision involves a considerable reorganisation of society that ensures people can be supported and sustained ('Mighty Community'). Ultimately, Maeyama hopes that the new perspectives brought to light by his research can promote change in how local governments and various organisations as its cells operate and govern and help tackle disparities, discrimination and social fragmentation in communities across the globe. Maeyama and his team believe that citizen-governance is key to establish new paradigm-shifted governments and the necessary co-production for local residents after Covid-19.

Research Proposal: Cryptocurrency User Attitudes Towards the Environmental Impact of Proof-of-Work

The consumption of electrical energy is a requisite for ‘proof-of-work’, a class of consensus protocols for decentralised systems. ‘Ethereum’ and ‘Bitcoin’, along with various other cryptocurrencies, use implementations of such a consensus protocol. Among experts, the vast energy demand associated with the rising popularity of cryptocurrencies and the potential impact on climate change have been discussed extensively. It is, however, unclear what attitudes the users of cryptocurrencies themselves have towards the consequences of its growing energy demand. The proposed study aims to answer this question through survey research, using ‘Bitcoin’ as an archetype of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency. Conducting the study will reveal whether cryptocurrency users themselves consider their energy needs to be problematic, and which stakeholders they hold accountable to reduce consumption. The outcome can provide a theoretical grounding in social science for the ongoing implementation of alternative consensus models, for example in the context of the ‘Eth2’ upgrade of the ‘Ethereum’ blockchain.

Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact Tracing

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies.

Without a trace: Why did corona apps fail?

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Mathematical modelling suggests that differently configured apps have the potential to do this. These require, however, that some pseudonymised data be stored on a central server, which privacy advocates have cautioned against. We contend that their influential arguments are subject to two fallacies. First, they have tended to one-sidedly focus on the risks that centralised data storage entails for privacy, while paying insufficient attention to the fact that inefficient contact tracing involves ethical risks too. Second, while the envisioned system does entail risks of breaches, such risks are also present in decentralised systems, which have been falsely presented as ‘privacy preserving by design’. When these points are understood, it becomes clear that we must rethink our approach to digital contact tracing in our fight against COVID-19.

Social Policy in India: One Hundred Years of the (Stifled) Social Question

What social policy is possible in a context where equality among citizens is culturally denied but at the same time constitutionally guaranteed? This chapter attempts to answer this question by periodising how the social question was articulated in India during the last 100 years. While philosophical and religious traditions of India created “duty-oriented” social relations, the rise of the modern state prompted to change this into “right-oriented” social obligations. This tension resurfaced in the history of Indian social question through prioritising political freedom over social unfreedom, nation-building over poverty alleviation, homogenised national identity over the particularistic demands of marginalised sections, and authoritarian polity over decentralised systems. It suffices to say that Indian polity is in a denial mode regarding the social question.

Modelling resilient collaborative multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems constitute a wide class of decentralised systems. Their functions are usually carried out by collaborative activities of agents. To ensure resilience of multi-agent systems, we should endow them with a capability to dynamically reconfigure. Usually, as a result of reconfiguration, the existing relationships between agents are changed and new collaborations are established. This is a complex and error-prone process, which can be facilitated by the use of formal reasoning and automated verification. In this paper, we propose a generic resilience-explicit formalisation of the main concepts of multi-agent systems. Based on it, we introduce corresponding specification and refinement patterns in Event-B. Our patterns facilitate modelling behaviour of resilient multi-agent systems in a rigorous systematic way and verification of their properties. We demonstrate the application of the proposed approach by a case study—a smart warehouse system.