Doing Research With Online Platforms

The post-API age in digital research has brought immediate consequences in research activities based on (big) data owned by online platforms. Even some initiatives made by online platforms themselves, mainly based on funding specific research projects, have not found a warm reception in the research community and have been considered not enough to do research on the most relevant phenomena of the digital public sphere. Therefore, since the access-to-data has become a relevant issue even for civil society organizations and public actors dealing with digital ecosystem, a specific brand-new issue network among public institutions, NGOs, and researches has been established. The technical expertise, the shared interests, and the fulfilment of similar goals in shaping public values in the online platforms activities seem to be crucial to the permanence and even to the institutionalization of such an issue network.

The Friendly Health Issue Network to Support Computer-Assisted Education for Clinical Reasoning in Multimorbidity Patients

Clinical reasoning in multimorbidity conditions asks for the ability to anticipate the possible evolutions of the overall health state of a patient and to identify the interactions among the concurrent health issues and their treatments. The HIN (Health Issue Network) approach, as Petri Nets-based formal language, is introduced as capable of providing a novel perspective to facilitate the acquisition of such competencies, graphically representing the network among a set of health issues (HIs) that affect a person throughout their life, and describing how HIs evolve over time. The need to provide a more immediate user-oriented interface has led to the development of f-HIN (friendly HIN), a lighter version based on the same mathematical properties as HIN, from which stems in turn the f-HINe (friendly HIN extracted) model, used to represent networks related to either real patients’ clinical experiences extracted from electronic health records, or from teacher-designed realistic clinical histories. Such models have also been designed to be embedded in a software learning environment that allows drawing a f-HIN diagram, checking for its format correctness, as well as designing clinical exercises for the learners, including their computer-assisted assessment. The present paper aims at introducing and discussing the f-HIN/f-HINe models and their educational use. It also introduces the main features of the software learning environment it was built upon, pointing out its importance to: (i) help medical teachers in designing and representing the context of a learning outcome; and (ii) handle the complex history of a multimorbidity patient, to be conveyed in Case-Based Learning (CBL) exercises.

Stakeholder Participation and Advocacy Coalitions for Making Sustainable Fiji Mineral Royalty Policy

The Fiji government perceived mining as a means to accelerate economic growth because of its potential to generate great wealth for the Fijian economy. However, the environmental and social impacts associated with mining is of great concern. Mining activities have caused immense environmental degradations that affect livelihoods. One way to recompense these mining impacts is to provide a source of income to the landowners that can substitute the providence of natural resources that were damaged or completely taken away by mining activities. From the current revenue earned from mining, only land leases have been paid out to landowners and no royalty payments as yet, because there are no specific guidelines to determine the distributions. These have brought about the great need to determine the fair share of mineral royalties between the Fiji Government and the landowners in Fiji. This paper will therefore explicate the formation of coalitions based on similarities in policy beliefs, the various strategies undertaken to interact and network with each coalition in efforts to advocate core policy beliefs to obtain government’s attention for the formulation of Fiji’s Mineral Royalty Policy, based on the analytical lenses of Advocacy Coalition Framework and Issue Network Theory, at both the problem definition and agenda setting stages. Moreover, this paper also investigates the impacts of political instability in formulating Fiji’s first ever Mineral Royalty Policy.

Identifying Hyperlink Strategies as a Tool to Discover the Connections between Offline and Online Politics

This chapter sheds light onto theoretical and empirical debates regarding the nature hyperlink as a political tool: whether the hyperlink is part of the “offline world” or should be considered as a new and separate form of practice, mainly due to its low cost and easy construction. The chapter contributes to the present literature in two innovative ways: First, based on link analysis between 90 Websites of protest Israeli NGO, a classification of link strategies was made, and 4 different linking strategies were found: Isolation, Introversion, Neighborliness, and Generalization. Furthermore, this chapter analyzes 15 protest issues and is not focused only on a single issue network. Second, 29 in-depth interviews were conduct and enable a sketch of the “offline link analysis map” and a comparison of the online policies with the offline policies. In order to understand the choice of the organization linking strategy over the others, and the decision to which exactly other organizations/Websites link to, one must remember that the Web is only one arena where the political actors operate. Therefore, the in-depth interviews not only reveal the causes affecting the hyperlinks selection and strategy in each organization but also reveal similarities between the organizations with overlap linking strategy.