Pär-Ola Zander

Public deliberation in municipal planning: supporting action and reflection with mobile technology

This paper reports on an exploratory participatory design process aimed at supporting citizen deliberation in municipal planning. It presents the main outcomes of this process in terms of selected prototypes and an approach to the use setting. We support and discuss different ways for citizens to act and reflect on proposed plans: in-situ, while physically close to the planning object, and ex-situ, when citizens are remote from this. The support of in-situ and ex-situ participation allows citizens to engage in continuous reflection-in and on-action as a collaborative activity with other citizens, hereby inspiring citizens to increase their democratic engagement.

Participation in design between public sector and local communities

This paper discusses three cases where design was carried out at the intersection between public sector and citizen communities. Based on three dominant traditions meeting there--public (municipal) decision-making, Web 2.0 and participatory design--we identify challenges and solutions regarding participation and engagement of municipal workers and citizens. While this intersection is exactly where a new form of democratic participation could develop, the three traditions were, nonetheless, far from easily combined in the specific cases. The challenges that we have identified are to: Identify win-win situations, rather than to maximize participation; to work with motivation for long-term projects across municipality and communities; to identify and work with early movers, and not just representative citizens; and to create space for local municipal agencies to develop bottom-up technological solutions. The multiplicity of co-existing traditions of involvement need more focus in the future development of participatory design.

The Dream About the Magic Silver Bullet: the Complexity of Designing for Tablet-Mediated Learning

In this paper, we report three cases of the integration of technology such as web-enabled media tablets in Scandinavian schools. Both qualitative and quantitative data have been applied. A daily challenge for teachers is to coordinate their group of students in a way that enables collaborative learning. We report the gaps and interrelations between the dreams and the practice of the teachers. They dream about an interconnected praxis -- the magic silver bullet -- and establish their visions of inter-connectivity because of their breakdown experiences of media tablets aiding complexity instead of reducing it. The teachers must learn how to navigate during the breakdowns before media tablets reduce complexity and reach a state in which the tablets take part in the classroom ecology as functional organs. The teachers have to deal with complex situations during class in situ. In order to be able to continue with the class, the teachers become jongleurs of different design elements including the handling of the didactical designs and the breakdowns caused by the integration of media tablets; the teaching practice in classrooms moves away from a common routine activity and turns into a design project.

Unleashing Tabular Content to Open Data: A Survey on PDF Table Extraction Methods and Tools

Portable Document Format (PDF) has been a popular way to exchange data in documents since Adobe introduced the format in 1993. Its report-like characteristic which preserves and prioritizes graphical visualization was part of the main publishing concerns among several segments including government agencies. In this way, tabular data started to be enclosed within PDF documents and disclosed in government portals. This situation, apart being surprisingly contradictory to data openness, is still found even in the major open data initiatives. It is estimated that roughly 13% of published files in some main open data portals around the world have their data made available in PDF. Thus, there is a need for effective tools capable of extracting tabular content (a main placeholder for data) from PDF to allow its data to be published in more open formats such as the well-known CSV which complies with accessible and machine processable open data principles. This paper aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the research in tabular content extraction specifically from PDF documents as well as to provide an overview of most recent practical results in the literature. The contribution of this work goes beyond theoretical discussions by helping data practitioners to understand to what extent methods and tools regarding tabular content extraction from PDF can benefit the open data initiatives in practical and effective ways.

Academic domains as political battlegrounds : a global enquiry by 99 academics in the fields of education and technology

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human constituents of an academic realm, with the two shaping one another. One implication of this proposition is that these non-human elements exist as political ‘actors’, just like their human counterparts, having ‘agency’ – which they exercise over humans. This turns academic domains into political (functional or dysfunctional) ‘battlefields’ wherein both humans and non-humans engage in political activities and actions that form the identity of the academic domain.

Investigating open data portals automatically: a methodology and some illustrations

Deploying a suitable open data platform is one of the most important requirements for succeeding in the provision of open data. Currently, there are several platforms available in the market ranging from the commercial ecosystem to free and open source software. However, we know less about the extent to which they are adopted and what they offer. This paper aims to provide a methodology to investigate this. The methodology is illustrated through studying adoption and use of open data software platforms through a comprehensive survey of 3,152 open data portals worldwide. We have identified 1,104 installations relying on the main existing platforms CKAN, Socrata, ArcGIS Open Data, and OpenDataSoft. To support our analysis, we have automatically fetched metadata about 1,921,636 stored datasets. Our findings indicated that there is a gap between the adoption and the effective use of open data platforms, particularly in terms of technology choice. These data are both from a descriptive and analytical point, non-trivial and showcase the relevance of the methodology. This work makes contributions regarding the development of methods to automatically survey open data platforms and provides insights about availability of open data portals based on the utilization of software platforms, organized by country and frequency of dataset updates.

Baudrillard's Theory of Value: A Baby in the Marxist Bath Water?

Jean Baudrillard outlined a theory of value in his early writings that built on, but also criticized, Marxist concepts of use value and exchange value. In this paper, I use a close reading to delineate the diachronic transition of Baudrillards writings toward anti-Marxism and (allegedly) postmodernism, with specific focus on his value theory, in order to understand his own reasons for abandoning his previous position. I then follow the marginal stream of scholars who are making use of the early Baudrillard. I find his value theory promising but still a mere sketch rather than an actual general theory. The paper concludes that Baudrillards arguments for abandoning Marxism altogether are problematic and led him away from developing a more finished theory of value. This is unfortunate because it remains a project that may yield interesting insights even in contemporary social theory, not least in supporting reconciliation (e.g., between critical semiotics-influenced positions and Marxism).