Contracting is an important aspect of IT governance and control. This aspect involves the manner in which goals are set, their achievements rewarded and penalized. In the context of service level agreements it has been shown that contracts that involve penalties have positive effects on individuals’ effort and negative effects on individuals’ attitude such as fairness perception. The negative e...

We analyze support for EU membership as expressed in voting patterns in the candidate countries’ referenda on EU membership, using regional referendum results and individual survey data on voting intentions. We find that favorable individual and regional characteristics are positively correlated with support for accession and voter participation. In contrast, those who should benefit from futur...

BACKGROUND Policy dialogues are critical for developing responsive, effective, sustainable, evidence-informed policy. Our multidisciplinary team, including researchers, physicians and senior decision-makers, comprehensively evaluated The Winnipeg Central Intake Service, a single-entry model in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to improve patient access to hip/knee replacement surgery. We used the evaluation ...

Candidates in major political contests are commonly endorsed by other politicians, interest groups and celebrities. Prior to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a celebrity with a proven track record of influencing her fans’ commercial decisions. In this paper, we use geographic differences in subscriptions to O! – The Oprah Magazine and the sal...

The enterprise track caught our attention, since the task is similar to a project we carried our for the BBC. Our motivation for participation has been twofold: On one hand, there is the usual challenge to design and test the quality of retrieval strategies. On the other hand, and for us very important, the TREC participation has been an opportunity to investigate the resource effort it require...

Traditional e-learning uses information and communication technologies to facilitate participant connections, expand access, and provide learning opportunities not necessarily constrained by time or distance (e.g., Evans and Powell 2007). ee-Learning leverages e-learning technology with the philosophy and methodology of experiential education, promoting inquiring forms of community that engage ...

The idea of public participation GIS involves the use of GIS tools to help laypcople understand the spatial consequences of proposed projects, evaluate alternatives, and create new solutions. The widening use of information networks creates opportunities for making GIS a widely accessible decision-making tool, bypassing the constraints of location and time. This paper presents a prototype softw...

Participation of the diaspora in the Partnership The Joint Africa-EU Strategic Partnership1 offers a window of opportunity for the African diaspora in Europe to enrich the ongoing Africa-EU political dialogue. In this regard, the diaspora’s proactive participation is indispensable. The partnership also provides feasible entry points for diaspora organisations to participate actively in the oper...

Governments today recognise that to deliver effective public policy they need to enhance citizen and community involvement in the policy making process, particularly amongst the socially disadvantaged and hard to reach. For the average EU citizen let alone a newly arrived immigrant, locating, accessing and using upto-date information and tools can often be very difficult. Puzzled by Policy (PBP...