Remedial Boundary Work and Gatekeeper Centrality in a Virtual Entrepreneur Community

Virtual communities of practice invoke novel forms of boundary work that are newly visible via publicly recorded discourse and failure narratives. This boundary work has critical implications for occupational knowledge, membership, and stratification. Building on social exchange theorization of network gatekeeping, the author tests the assumption that centralized peers are more competitive gatekeepers, in that they react more negatively to remedial narratives. The author tests this theory using empirical data from a virtual entrepreneur community on Reddit. The author finds that a peer’s tenure in the community network is directly related to exclusive, competitive boundary work of remedial members. However, by looking beyond the network structure to the content of the tie, the author finds that exclusive boundary work is not as impactful as inclusive, collaborative boundary work in this open network setting. The author builds on relational cohesion and exchange commitment theory to explain how remedial practitioners circumvent central community gatekeepers through failure narratives that provoke empathy from peripheral peers who experience higher uncertainty than core peers. Understanding these dynamics is critical to promoting recovery from failure and vitality of the community of practice.

The Vulnerability of the Blockchain Network From the Consensus Perspective

The blockchain is a registry shared among different participants intending to eliminate the need for a central authority to maintain information. The first proposal of this technology was to eliminate financial authorities in transactions of value. However, the application of the same technique for the transaction of information could facilitate trades and offer traceability and diamond tracking around the world. The consensus is at the core of the network because it orchestrates nodes to accept new information, but it operates over a data structure in an open network, consequently leading to many complex behaviours that introduce different vulnerabilities. This work aims to highlight the vulnerability within the blockchain network based on the different participant behaviours that dominate the shared registry. Moreover, different malicious behaviour can appear on the networking layer by taking advantage of the network topology.

A fusion data security protection scheme for sensitive E-documents in the open network environment

E-documents are carriers of sensitive data, and their security in the open network environment has always been a common problem with the field of data security. Based on the use of encryption schemes to construct secure access control, this paper proposes a fusion data security protection scheme. This scheme realizes the safe storage of data and keys by designing a hybrid symmetric encryption algorithm, a data security deletion algorithm, and a key separation storage method. The scheme also uses file filter driver technology to design a user operation state monitoring method to realize real-time monitoring of user access behavior. In addition, this paper designs and implements a prototype system. Through the verification and analysis of its usability and security, it is proved that the solution can meet the data security protection requirements of sensitive E-documents in the open network environment.

Escaping the Survival Trap: Network Transition among Early-Career Freelance Songwriters

People in the early stages of their careers often face a trade-off between cultivating a closed network that helps them secure the resources they need to survive or developing an open network that can help them succeed. Actors who overcome this trade-off transition from a closed network to an open network; those who fail to do so can be caught in a survival trap that jeopardizes their chances of having a successful career. We identify the factors that enable and constrain network transitions and test our theory on a sample of Korean pop (K-pop) freelance songwriters before they have attained their first commercial hit. These songwriters initially rely on a closed network of collaborators and transition toward an open network by working with fellow songwriters who are not connected to those collaborators. This network transition occurs faster among songwriters who eventually attain their first hit than among those who remain unsuccessful. Songwriters are more likely to collaborate with new distant colleagues when they have a reference group of commercially successful peers and when they have created stylistically similar songs in the past that have failed to become hits. However, most of their new distant colleagues also lack a hit, revealing a status barrier that constrains the network transition of early-career songwriters.

Agent-based access control framework for enterprise content management

Telework is an important alternative to work that seeks to enhance employees’ safety and well-being while reducing the company costs. Employees can work anytime, any where and under high mobility conditions using new devices. Therefore, the access control of remote exchanges of Enterprise Content Management systems (ECM) have to take into consideration the diversity of users’ devices and context conditions in a telework open network. Different access control models were proposed in the literature to deal with the dynamic nature of users’ context and devices. However, most access control models rely on a centralized management of permissions by an authorization entity which can reduce its performance with the increase of number of users and requests in an open network. Moreover, they often depend on the administrator’s intervention to add new devices’ authorization and to set permissions on resources. In this paper, we suggest a distributed management of access control for telework open networks that focuses on an agent-based access control framework. The framework uses a multi-level rule engine to dynamically generate policies. We conducted a usability test and an experiment to evaluate the security performance of the proposed framework. The result of the experiment shows that the ability to resist deny of service attacks over time increased in the proposed distributed access control management compared with the centralized approach.

The Global Medieval Sourcebook: Creating a Sustainable Digital Anthology of Medieval Texts and Translations

This paper introduces the Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS), an online repository of medieval texts and translations with an open network of contributors. Drawing on our experience developing and building this project in two phases over six years, we reflect on questions regarding editorial, curatorial, and translation practices, and on technical issues involved in the preparation, display, and preservation of texts for online publication. As an example of a scholar-led digital project, the trajectory of the GMS has broad relevance for scholars planning digital curation work of their own. In particular, it offers a salutary example of the infrastructural barriers to sustaining collaborative digital work and a possible model for preserving a concluded project.

LEARNING FROM NONHUMAN ANIMALS: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF POSTHUMANITIES

Throughout the debated discourse of humanism, humans were considered as the only species endowed with reason and moral values. The result was an andro/anthropocentric humanism that divided everything into hierarchies and confined everything within boundaries. European model of higher education has undoubtedly been an enforcement of humanist ideas and ideologies which established certain humans as exceptional and superior to other ‘non-privileged’ humans and nonhuman animals. In this era of posthumanism all the imposed and imbibed boundaries between the human and nonhuman are being questioned, challenged and eliminated to create an open network of cross-species encounters. In this context this article through the theories of Posthuman philosophy and Critical Animal Studies proposes a shift towards posthuman ethics of inclusion and understanding in the field of classical humanities in India. This can be achieved by employing postontological methods to create and understand nonhuman representations. Theories and studies by posthuman scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Graham Harman form the basis of this paper. This article is an acknowledgement as well as an advocation of the shift happening across disciplines from humanities to posthumanities, which however is yet to make a movement in education in India.

Permissioned vs. Permissionless Blockchain: How and Why There Is Only One Right Choice

The blockchain structure can be utilized in an efficient way to verify and ensure the integrity of the data and prevent historical transactions from tampering, such that if one block is altered, then the rest of next blocks are no longer valid. However, it is possible to re-calculate all the next blocks in a closed and permissioned network, such that all altered blocks will become valid again. In other words, only chaining blocks to each other, based on the hash of the previous one, cannot ensure the integrity and the security of the data and protect transactions against tampering. In this paper, we motivate why permissionless blockchain in an open network should be considered as the only acceptable type of blockchain and show that permissioned blockchain and closed network makes chaining transactions (i.e. blockchain) as an unhelpful structure. Of course, this never means that we ignore the existing problems in permissionless blockchains (such as, scalability of the network and transaction throughput), but also, we argue that permissioned blockchain cannot be an acceptable solution for those problems, where chaining transactions will no longer be meaningful. In other words, in a closed network, we no longer need to chain transactions. Although, this is a central issue and has been addressed in recent years, we are trying to bring new elements and an enriched point of view.