Francesco Bolici

Organizational trust in a networked world Analysis of the interplay between social factors and Information and Communication Technology

Purpose – Trust is a social factor at the foundations of human action. The pervasiveness of trust explains why it has been studied by a large variety of disciplines, and its complexity justifies the difficulties in reaching a shared understanding and definition. As for all the social factors, trust is continuously evolving as a result of the changes in social, economic and technological conditions. The internet and many other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions have changed organizational and social life. Such mutated scenarios challenged what researchers know about trust, thus several studies tried to investigate the difference between online and traditional (physical) environments. The purpose of this paper is to solve this multi‐dimensional puzzle by presenting a conceptual framework that will take into consideration the complexity of ICT mediated‐trust.Design/methodology/approach – The extant literature still lacks a homogeneous framework and presents a large amount of different...

Cooperating Strategies in e-Government

Public administration (PA) has significantly shifted its interests to reach the innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), as a result of e-Government projects. The new challenge for public administrations is based on the exploitation of their knowledge resources in order to improve their processes and to offer better services to the users. The aim of this contribution is to investigate the spreading of cooperating strategies in public administrations in order to better understand why and how these organizational behaviors could assure advantages for PA and citizens.

HeritageBot Service Robot assisting in Cultural Heritage

This paper presents results of HeritageBot, a regional research project for developing a robotic platform to be used in Cultural Heritage frameworks. The design and a prototype of HBOT Platform for demo purposes is introduced with features of low-cost construction and user-oriented performance. The design requirements are presented for application in monitoring and working within frames for conservation of goods of Cultural Heritage with characteristics that are aimed for technological transfer and entrepreneurship plans.

Stigmergic coordination in FLOSS development teams

The vast majority of literature on coordination in team-based projects has drawn on a conceptual separation between explicit (e.g. plans, feedback) and implicit coordination mechanisms (e.g. mental maps, shared knowledge). This analytic distinction presents some limitations in explaining how coordination is reached in organizations characterized by distributed teams, scarce face to face meetings and fuzzy and changing lines of authority, as in free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development.Analyzing empirical illustrations from two FLOSS projects, we highlight the existence of a peculiar model, stigmergic coordination, which includes aspects of both implicit and explicit mechanisms. The work product itself (implicit) and the characteristics under which it is shared (explicit) play an under-appreciated role in helping software developers manage dependencies as they arise. We develop this argument beyond the existing literature by working with an existing coordination framework, considering the role that the codebase itself might play at each step. We also discuss the features and the practices to support stigmergic coordination in distributed teams, as well as recommendations for future research.

Design Science and eTrust: Designing Organizational Artifacts as Nexus of Social and Technical Interactions

Our research aims to investigate an open problem: the difficulty to build a virtual system in which trust-relationships can be created and managed. To address this problem in a manner consistent with the Design Science (DS) approach, we design a model for trust-based interactions in online distributed networks (e.g., online collaborative environments) that takes into consideration both technical and social factors. Simultaneously considering artifact’s characteristics and individual behavior, we build our model on the consideration that technology and social aspects are not dichotomous, but rather inseparable [1]. The proposed model would offer a conceptual contribution in addressing the problem of generating and managing trust in distributed settings.

Panel: Governance in Open Source Projects and Communities

“Although considerable research has been devoted to the growth and expansion of open source communities and the comparison between the efficiency of corporate structures and community structures in the field of software development, rather less attention has been paid to their governance structures (control, monitoring, supervision)” (Lattemann and Stieglitz 2005).

PA's boundaries and the organizational knowledge processes

Some researchers propose a wide variety of technological tools that can improve the management of a specific knowledge. However, often those prescriptions are based only on the characteristics and on (promised) potentialities of the technological solutions. This paper is written on the premise that “[s]o as information technology tunnels deeper and deeper into everyday life, its time to think not simply in terms of the next quadrillion packets or the next megaflop of processing power, but to look instead to things that lie beyond information”[3]. Our contribution analyses the main characteristics of the knowledge management strategy in the PA. Moreover the paper proposes the social practical perspective as interpretative framework for future researches.

Knowledge and Boundaries in e-Government

The new challenge for PAs is based on the exploitation of their knowledge resources in order to improve internal processes and to offer better services. This brief contribution suggests that a useful approach to knowledge issue in PAs lies in the analyses of the dynamic coordination of intangible as- sets produced near CoPs borders.