Infrastructuring Public Consultation in Town Planning— How Town Planners Translate Public Consultation into a Socio-Technical Support System

For public consultation in town planning, town planners can employ various software systems to improve the dialogue with citizens. This article looks at attempts to do so by following the work of a team of municipal town planners across four stages of public consultation held between 2012 and 2015. The study is based on detailed semi-structured interviews, field notes from regular visits to the planners’ office, and a database of public consultation comments and attendance at consultation events across the stages. Using an approach that considers planners’ work in the selection and implementation of software within institutional objectives and constraints as “infrastructure” work, we examine the joint deployment, use and effects of nine software tools and arising practices for public consultations. Our findings demonstrate how the infrastructure work of planners involved numerous interpretations about the possibilities for software adaptation and the effects of software use, which were enabled and constrained by consultation and planning requirements. The results also indicate a role for researchers in helping planners mediate between formal processes and public concerns, and illustrates how this technological-institutional struggle in infrastructuring work forms an essential part of town planners’ practice.

Computational Intractability Law Molds the Topology of Biological Networks

Virtually all molecular interaction networks (MINs), irrespective of organism or physiological context, have a majority of loosely-connected ‘leaf’ genes interacting with at most 1-3 genes, and a minority of highly-connected ‘hub’ genes interacting with at least 10 or more other genes. Previous reports proposed adaptive and non-adaptive hypotheses describing sufficient but not necessary conditions for the origin of this majority-leaves minority-hubs (mLmH) topology. We modeled the evolution of MINs as a computational optimization problem which describes the cost of conserving, deleting or mutating existing genes so as to maximize (minimize) the overall number of beneficial (damaging) interactions network-wide. The model 1) provides sufficient and, assuming , necessary conditions for the emergence of mLmH as a software adaptation to circumvent computational intractability, 2) predicts the percentage number of genes having d interacting partners, and 3) when employed as a fitness function in an evolutionary algorithm, produces mLmH-possessing synthetic networks whose degree distributions match those of equal-size MINs.SummaryOur results indicate that the topology of molecular interaction networks is a selected-for software adaptation that minimizes the evolutionary cost of re-wiring the network in response to an evolutionary pressure to conserve, delete or mutate existing genes and interactions.

IT-CONSULTING IS THE FUNDAMENTAL FACTOR OF IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF AGRO-INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION

IT-consulting is a kind of outsourcing services, which are characterized by the provision of advisory assistance in the field of information technology. IT-enterprises are consulting for IT-consulting, which are planning to take the business to a higher level. Despite the fact that the IT-consulting market is characterized by a high level of competition, not all firms that provide IT-services have a high organization of internal business processes. An urgent issue requiring research is the search for ways to improve the efficiency of IT-consulting firms. Currently, the agro-industrial complex, like any other sphere of business, does not do without information technology. Software solutions for automation of agrarian enterprises are characterized by features that are determined by the specifics of agricultural production processes. For agriculture, IT-solutions are needed, developed for certain segments - plant growing, livestock, processing, production, etc. In order to increase the efficiency of agribusiness, in terms of reducing operating costs and production costs, the most promising direction is the application of management systems and optimization of production processes. In view of the fact that in agricultural enterprises there are often no specialists with the necessary skills for setting up and maintaining already established software solutions, there is a need to consult IT-consulting services. The functions of IT-consulting are as follows: - selection of software for solving specific problems of the agricultural enterprise; - training in working with special software;- adaptation of agricultural software to the needs of the enterprise. The work of the consultants of IT consulting companies should be to find the most suitable software solution and inform the company’s management of the importance of using complex products in production, the advantages of automation of management processes, and also to train qualified personnel and

Open Source Software Adaptation in Africa

The African continent has long benefited from adopting OSS in its private and public organizations that have changed their way of development, the use and how to acquire proprietary software. This frequency of adaptation does not appear to be in balance with the contribution to the OSS community. Using views from experienced software practitioners working in different organizations across two African countries it has been observed that neglected infrastructure, a wide availability of proprietary software and misconceptions of a clear meaning of Open Source Software across Africa have been an obstacle towards the participation in the OSS technology in the global network.