Sustaining Democracy

Democratic spaces must also be durable. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to our communities and to other members; they help us sustain communities. Chapter 3 draws from Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on democracy to explain how the durability of the built environment can be a powerful resource for generating the attachments that sustain democratic communities by (1) continually reminding citizens of their social obligations and (2) facilitating repeated interactions between citizens. The chapter then turns to the example of Twitter—particularly the mechanism of hashtags—to explore these dynamics in a digital environment. Hashtags provide temporary boundaries that are useful for mobilizing, but not sustaining, communities of interest; as a result, Twitter is not a platform well suited for cultivating the attachments required for longer-term cooperative activity. The chapter concludes with suggestions as to how we might design more durable spaces—and sustainable communities—in digital environments.

Incorporating heterogeneous information in deep learning with informative meta-paths for community recommendations

Communities of interest promote knowledge sharing and discovery in social network platforms. However, platform users face difficulties of finding suitable communities, given their increasing number. Although recommendations have been proposed to help users find communities of interest, these methods ignore or exclude heterogeneous interactions between users and communities. In addition, widely used meta-paths help capture the complex semantic relation among entities but heavily rely on domain knowledge. In this study, we propose a novel recommendation model based on informative meta-path discovery in heterogeneous information networks and deep learning. Users, communities, relevant items and their relations are considered as entities in a heterogeneous information network, from where informative meta-paths are extracted on the basis of information theory to measure user-community similarities. Finally, similarities are incorporated in a deep learning model to predict whether target users join candidate communities. The proposed recommendation model is evaluated and compared against baseline methods using two data sets. Results demonstrate the superior performance of the present model in terms of precision, recall and F score.

Expression of Story: Ethical considerations for participatory, community- and arts-based research relationships

INTRODUCTION: This meta-research article considers the ethics and efficacy of a nonviolent, “braided” methodology used by a research study called “The Recognition Project.” The methodology of The Recognition Project interweaved participatory, community-, and arts- based approaches in an effort to create a cooperative, relationally oriented environment where three distinct communities of interest could contribute respectively—and collaboratively—to the sharing, creation, and public dance performance of stories about self-harm. The three communities of interest were university-based researchers, community-based researchers who had engaged in self-harm, and an artist team of choreographers, a musician, and professional youth dancers. Our article explores some of the experiences, as shared by dancers of the artist team, from narrative interviews following the final dance performance.METHOD: Data were collected through qualitative interviews conducted with six artist team members. A qualitative thematic analysis approach was used to identify the main themes.FINDINGS: What emerged was an overriding theme about Story and the power issues that came forward due to the personal and the collective aspects of Story. The power issues were related to individual and collective exercise of power, the use of dialogue to build a positive community, and the transformative potential for the artist collaborators to participate in such a study.CONCLUSION: While participatory, community- and arts-based projects are often taken up with the intention of facilitating research that will not harm, there are important and additional ethical considerations to be made in community-based collaborations that feature difference across perspective, experience, skill, and knowledge.

Control Baselines for Information Systems and Organizations

This publication provides security and privacy control baselines for the Federal Government. There are three security control baselines (one for each system impact level—low-impact, moderate-impact, and high-impact), as well as a privacy baseline that is applied to systems irrespective of impact level. In addition to the control baselines, this publication provides tailoring guidance and a set of working assumptions that help guide and inform the control selection process. Finally, this publication provides guidance on the development of overlays to facilitate control baseline customization for specific communities of interest, technologies, and environments of operation.