Strategic Use Of Information Research Articles

Towards Desirable Futures

The 20th anniversary of The Journal of Community Informatics signifies a milestone in the evolution of community informatics (CI) as a field dedicated to empowering communities through the strategic use of information and communication technology (ICT). This article offers some personal reflections on the origins and evolution of CI, tracing its roots to seminal works by scholars such as Michael Gurstein. It also tells the story of how urban informatics was inspired by CI as a distinct field of scholarship to study the interplay between people, place, and technology in urban environments. Building on this foundation, the present challenges and opportunities facing CI are explored, including issues of digital inclusion, ethical implications of emerging technologies, and the transformative potential of ICTs for social change. Looking ahead, the article envisions desirable futures for CI grounded in a life-centred approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of humans and non-humans within larger ecological systems. Embracing a more-than-human paradigm, CI is uniquely positioned to advocate for ecological justice, amplify the voices of marginalised human and non-human communities, and foster collaboration between humans and the environment to create and protect resilient and sustainable habitat for life on this planet. Through these efforts, CI can contribute to a more just, equitable, and sustainable future for all living beings, averting the planetary ecocide that threatens our shared existence.

A Qualitative Investigation of Academic Success: Insights from High School Achievers

High School examinations present a significant hurdle for students, and achieving top performance requires a multifaceted approach. The proliferation of the internet has democratized access to knowledge, empowering individuals to pursue self-directed learning opportunities. This study sought to identify the common attributes of high-achieving students with the goal of inspiring and guiding underperforming students to emulate these successful behaviours and elevate their own academic performance. Employing a qualitative research methodology, the study utilized purposeful sampling to select seven (n=7) high performing students from Daga Central School. Thematic analysis revealed eleven shared attributes that contribute to academic success: a strong reading habit, focused engagement during classroom instruction, effective time management skills, meticulous organization of study materials, consistent review of learned materials, strategic use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance learning, a supportive school environment, the presence of an inspiring role model, and a close-knit support system comprised of parents and teachers. These findings highlight that academic achievement transcends individual study habits; it is also highly influenced by external factors such as conducive learning environment, positive influence from educators, mentors, peers, and families. The study also discusses the implications of these findings for students, educators and other stakeholders in the educational landscape.

Integrity and credibility issues in strategic information on MSM and transgenders in Eastern Europe and Central Asia countries

The article describes the results of an expert survey of activists from two HIV-vulnerable communities (men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people), as well as public health professionals from seven countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region regarding the state of strategic information (SI) regarding MSM and trans people in the context of HIV at the national level (quality, integrity, relevance and use of data). An analysis of scientific literature on studies of these communities was also used. According to the level of completeness and quality of SI, the studied countries can be ranked in descending order as follows: Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, North Macedonia, Belarus, Estonia. At the same time, information about transgender people is available only in Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. The integrity, relevance and use of strategic information in countries mostly depend on the availability of international financial and technical assistance resources, as well as the institutional capacity of organizations of vulnerable communities, in particular in the area of advocacy of the interests of the communities they represent in state authorities. The quality of the available information is also determined by other factors: differences in the definitions of the studied communities (in particular, the inclusion of trans women in the group of men who have sex with men), failure to take into account migration processes, the size and structure of general populations (mostly unknown), the impossibility of constructing non-random samples of sufficient size or insufficient quality of construction of pseudo-random samples, lack of coverage of the entire territory of the respective countries (only the capital and sometimes large cities), etc. In general, with few exceptions, the strategic information available in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region on MSM and trans people in the context of HIV is incomplete, underutilized and of limited validity.

Cultural evolution of football tactics: strategic social learning in managers' choice of formation.

In order to adaptively solve complex problems or make difficult decisions, people must strategically combine personal information acquired directly from experience (individual learning) and social information acquired from others (social learning). The game of football (soccer) provides extensive real world data with which to quantify this strategic information use. I analyse a 5-year dataset of all games (n = 9127, 2012-2017) in five top European leagues to quantify the extent to which a manager's initial formation is guided by their personal past use or success with that formation, or other managers' use or success with that formation. I focus on the 4231 formation, the dominant formation during this period. As predicted, a manager's choice of whether to use 4231 is influenced by both their recent use of 4231 (personal information) and the use of 4231 in the entire population of managers in that division (social information). Against expectations, managers relied more on personal than social information, although this estimate was highly variable across managers and divisions. Finally, there did not appear to be an adaptive tradeoff between social and personal information use, with the relative reliance on each failing to predict managerial success.

The effects of big data over the analytical activities of strategic intelligence professionals in Brazil

Abstract The strategic use of information is at the core of the intelligence activity whose focus has been largely directed to the use of technology for data analysis. However, the cognitive aspects are the ones that most seem to challenge the transformation of information into intelligence, as they are associated with the psychological dimensions. This paper aims to examine how the big data phenomenon is perceived and influences the activities of strategic intelligence (SI) professionals in Brazil. The research was conducted as a qualitative study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 leading individuals in the field of strategic intelligence in Brazil followed by a content analysis technique for the data analysis. The results show the effects of big data are less influential over the cognitive dimension of the analyst, particularly in the skills to keep their open-mindedness and in the self-confidence to admit and learn from analytic errors.

Strategic Management of Information, Defense and Sustainability Policies in The Context of Legal Amazonia

The object of this paper is to study the correlations existent between the strategic use of information and the articulation and implementation of defense policies, national security and sustainable development in Legal Amazonia. For such, it presents the Amazonia Protection System (SIPAM in the Portuguese acronym), verifying how these systems have contributed to the definition and implantation of those policies. For Amazonia, with its natural resources, threats and vulnerabilities, the perspectives of integration, security and national defense and sustainable development present huge challenges to be surmounted. For such, the efficient use of technology is a basic reference that should be included in public strategies and policies in those areas, which increasingly reflect the ways of life in the region's cities. In that context, SIPAM sits in a line of approach in which the guarantee of national sovereignty in Amazonia, besides the strategic-military enterprise, also includes the attention to local people's development, within an educational and integrating proposition. As a way of conclusion, we have found that SIPAM creates a paradigmatic model for local public management, in which organizations work with a shared set of information, as well as in an integrated way.

Sustainability and Scale of the Saving Mothers, Giving Life Approach in Uganda and Zambia.

Saving Mothers, Giving Life (SMGL) significantly reduced maternal and perinatal mortality in Uganda and Zambia by using a district health systems strengthening approach to address the key delays women and newborns face in receiving quality, timely, and appropriate medical care. This article documents the transition of SMGL from pilot to scale in Uganda and Zambia and analyzes the sustainability of the approach, examining the likelihood of maintaining positive trends in maternal and newborn health in both countries. We analyzed the potential sustainment of SMGL achievements using a tool adapted from the HIV-focused domains and elements of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief Sustainability Index and Dashboard for maternal and neonatal health pro-gramming adding a domain on community normative change. Information for each of the 5 resulting domains was drawn from SMGL and non-SMGL reports, individual stakeholder interviews, and group discussions. In both Uganda and Zambia, the SMGL proof-of-concept phase catalyzed commitment to saving mothers and newborns and a renewed belief that significant change is possible. Increased leadership and accountability for maternal and newborn health, particularly at the district and facility levels, was bolstered by routine maternal death surveillance reviews that engaged a wide range of local leadership. The SMGL district-strengthening model was found to be cost-effective with cost of death averted estimated at US$177-206 per year of life gained. When further considering the ripple effect that saving a mother has on child survival and the household economy, the value of SMGL increases. Ministries of health and donor agencies have already demonstrated a willingness to pay this amount per year of life for other programs, such as HIV and AIDS. As SMGL scaled up in both Uganda and Zambia, the intentional integration of SMGL interventions into host country systems, alignment with other large-scale programs, and planned reductions in annual SMGL funding all contributed to increasing host government ownership of the interventions and set the SMGL approach on a path more likely to be sustained following the close of the initiative. Lessons from the learning districts resulted in increased efficiency in allocation of resources for maternal and newborn health, better use of strategic information, improved management capacities, and increased community engagement.

Need of Information Literacy in Higher Education

The knowledge economy is based primarily on the production and strategic use of information and knowledge. The ability to produce and use information effectively is thus a vital source of skills for citizens of the world. As India is moving towards information and knowledge-based society, it must be necessary for university students, research scholars and faculty members to possess competencies and information literacy skills to accomplish their research goals. Information literacy(IL) is becoming an increasingly important component of the higher educational curriculum, with many disciplines incorporating elements of information literacy training within their traditional teaching. This article will highlight on necessity and importance of information literacy in higher education.

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions of emotion during healthy aging: More similarities than differences.

Older adults tend to perform more poorly than younger adults on emotional expression identification tasks. The goal of the present study was to test a processing mechanism that might explain these differences in emotion recognition-specifically, age-related variation in the utilization of specific visual cues. Seventeen younger and 17 older adults completed a reverse-correlation emotion categorization task (Bubbles paradigm), consisting of a large number of trials in each of which only part of the visual information used to convey an emotional facial expression was revealed to participants. The task allowed us to pinpoint the visual features each group used systematically to correctly recognize the emotional expressions shown. To address the possibility that faces of different age groups are differently processed by younger and older adults, we included younger, middle-aged, and older adult face models displaying happy, fearful, angry, disgusted, and sad facial expressions. Our results reveal strong similarity in the utilization of visual information by younger and older adult participants in decoding the emotional expressions from faces across ages-particularly for happy and fear emotions. These findings suggest that age-related differences in strategic information use are unlikely to contribute to the decline of facial expression recognition skills observed in later life.

Information Behavior of Managers (IBM) and Strategic Information Use (SIU) in Malaysian Industries

This research examines the Information Behavior of Managers (IBM) and Strategic Information Use (SIU) in Malaysian industries. A total of 491 were involved in the study and results indicated that the IBM significantly influenced the strategic use of information in Malaysian industries. The results also showed that there were differences of IBM among industries in Malaysia. The findings of this study create awareness to the Malaysian industries on the importance of IBM. This study is perhaps one of the first to address IBM in the context of Malaysian industries.

Strategic Information Use (SIU) for Strategy Formulation in Malaysia Business Organizations

The purpose of the study is to examine the level of Strategic Information Use (SIU) among managers in Malaysia business organization. SIU among managers has raised a concern by many researchers in advanced countries as compared to Malaysia. The quantitative method of study and survey was conducted on 491 senior managers in manufacturing and financial services companies in Klang Valley, Malaysia. The findings indicate that the SIU level Malaysia business organization was high. It was also found that there was a significant difference between SIU in manufacturing and financial services companies. The result may provide further insights into SIU among managers in Malaysia business environment.

Distinct profiles of information-use characterize identity judgments in children and low-expertise adults.

Face processing abilities vary across the life span: increasing across childhood and adolescence, peaking around 30 years of age, and then declining. Despite extensive investigation, researchers have yet to identify qualitative changes in face processing during development that can account for the observed improvements on laboratory tests. The current study constituted the first detailed characterization of face processing strategies in a large group of typically developing children and adults (N = 200) using a novel adaptation of the Bubbles reverse correlation technique (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). Resultant classification images reveal a compelling age-related shift in strategic information use during participants' judgments of face identity. This shift suggests a move from an early reliance upon high spatial frequency details around the mouth, eye-brow and jaw-line in young children (∼8 years) to an increasingly more interlinked approach, focused upon the eye region and the center of the face in older children (∼11 years) and adults. Moreover, we reveal that the early versus late phases of this developmental trajectory correspond with the profiles of information use observed in weak versus strong adult face processors. Together, these results provide intriguing new evidence for an important functional role for strategic information use in the development of face expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record

LCHC: the evolution of a hybrid collaboratory

ABSTRACTThe focus of this paper is the role and context of electronic mail and Internet use in the evolution of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at UC San Diego, a long-lived international and interdisciplinary social science collaboratory or “laboratory without walls”. I analyse excerpts from LCHC publications, presentations, project reports, websites and archival materials to show how LCHC performs the functions of two collaboratory subtypes (Distributed Research Centre and Virtual Community of Practice) identified in the Science of Collaboratories literature. Strategic use of information and computing technology (ICT) amplified members’ inclusive practices predating the Internet to support collocated and distant researchers. Furthermore, becoming a hybrid collaboratory using ICT to support said practices was crucial to LCHC's sustainability. While prior research on collaboratories identified taxonomies (success factors, main functions), this paper explores connections between collaboratory technology use, membership and sustainability. LCHC members’ adaptation to organisational challenges over several decades may be of interest to scholars of early uses of the Internet to support international and interdisciplinary work.

Understanding Strategic Information Use During Emotional Expression Judgments in Williams Syndrome

ABSTRACTDetailed analysis of expression judgments in Williams syndrome reveals that successful emotion categorization need not reflect “classic” information processing strategies. These individuals draw upon a distinct set of featural details to identify happy and fearful faces that differ from those used by typically developing comparison groups: children and adults. The diagnostic visual information is also notably less interlinked in Williams syndrome, consistent with reports of diminished processing of configural information during face identity judgments. These results prompt reconsideration of typical models of face expertise by revealing that an age-appropriate profile of expression performance can be achieved via alternative routes.

Sustainability of health information systems: a three-country qualitative study in southern Africa

BackgroundHealth information systems are central to strong health systems. They assist with patient and program management, quality improvement, disease surveillance, and strategic use of information. Many donors have worked to improve health information systems, particularly by supporting the introduction of electronic health information systems (EHIS), which are considered more responsive and more efficient than older, paper-based systems. As many donor-driven programs are increasing their focus on country ownership, sustainability of these investments is a key concern. This analysis explores the potential sustainability of EHIS investments in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, originally supported by the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).MethodsUsing a framework based on sustainability theories from the health systems literature, this analysis employs a qualitative case study methodology to highlight factors that may increase the likelihood that donor-supported initiatives will continue after the original support is modified or ends.ResultsFindings highlight commonalities around possible determinants of sustainability. The study found that there is great optimism about the potential for EHIS, but the perceived risks may result in hesitancy to transition completely and parallel use of paper-based systems. Full stakeholder engagement is likely to be crucial for sustainability, as well as integration with other activities within the health system and those funded by development partners. The literature suggests that a sustainable system has clearly-defined goals around which stakeholders can rally, but this has not been achieved in the systems studied. The study also found that technical resource constraints – affecting system usage, maintenance, upgrades and repairs – may limit EHIS sustainability even if these other pillars were addressed.ConclusionsThe sustainability of EHIS faces many challenges, which could be addressed through systems’ technical design, stakeholder coordination, and the building of organizational capacity to maintain and enhance such systems. All of this requires time and attention, but is likely to enhance long-term outcomes.

Beyond naming and shaming: New modalities of information politics in human rights

ABSTRACTHow and why does information become currency in human rights advocacy? Human rights organizations (HROs) produce media content in an increasingly diverse manner today across multiple platforms, for divergent purposes, and for distinct audiences. Advocacy practices are no longer confined to fact-based reporting aimed at exposing abuse. The sheer magnitude of resources expended in communication evidences the early stages of a shift in which HROs widen their broadcast and target mass audiences. However, human rights scholarship has not adequately addressed this new trend, which has the capacity to radically alter the advocacy landscape. Moving beyond the traditionally narrow focus on “naming and shaming,” we contend that a critical, detailed approach to understanding the strategic use of information will reveal a more complete image of how HROs build influence through their communications strategies. Expanding upon Keck and Sikkink's concept of “information politics,” we develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes a set of practices we call media advocacy. Three unique modalities of media advocacy (juridical, revelatory, and activating) capture a robust portrait of information politics in twenty-first century human rights advocacy. Our innovative tools disclose specific operational and pragmatic implications for HROs, as well as help structure future research in this area.

Investment Location Selection based on Economic Intelligence and Macbeth Decision Aid Model

In this paper, the authors present a case study that aims to apply some sound MCDM techniques in the case of Economic Intelligence (EI) and show how the use of strategic information may help deciders to choose among geographic locations in which they could settle their investments. In this regard, the authors propose a new method that uses the multi-criteria decision support of MACBETH to tackle this issue. This method is used to rank thirteen countries likely to be chosen for location in order of preference from good to unfavourable. The integration of the MCDM in Economic Intelligence (EI) permits to rank countries of the Mediterranean according to their territorial competitiveness obtained through the global scores computed by the aforementioned technique of MACBETH. The results obtained allow the authors to affirm that France and Morocco have favourable strategic assets to attract foreign investment.

The Open Government Data Policy as a Strategic Use of Information to Entrench Neoliberalism? The Case of Italy

The philosophy of Open Government provides a new paradigm of innovation in public admin-istration built around three key words: transparency, participation and collaboration. Greater transparency of information about the PA and its way of working should help to regain public confidence in the institu-tions, motivating people to take a more active part in decision making processes. It should also encourage them to support the institutions by inputting their own knowledge and abilities, consequently engendering a widespread spirit of collaboration between different public authorities and between them and the pub-lic, businesses and non profit organisations, in order to relaunching the economic value of the Public Sec-tor Information (Huijboom, Van den Broek, 2011). The hypothesis behind this contribution, starting from an approach based on an interpretation of significant elements in public action (Moini 2013) and of their conceptual framework (Fischer 2003), is that through which open government, open data, social media, collective intelligence, and connectivity are key words in a new rhetoric of administrative innovation - summed up in the label ‘’government 2.0’’ - which refers to a form of public action easily seen to be drawn from the neoliberal paradigm (Jessop, 2002), even though subject to some variegated form at na-tional level

Strategic Use of Analytical Information in Transport Planning in China: How Is It Different from Western Democracies?

Theory on the strategic use of knowledge in planning large infrastructure projects is comparatively well-developed in the fields of public policy and urban/transport planning for Western democracies. But how policymakers make use of knowledge and what position policy analysts hold in non-Western countries still remains largely unknown territory in the literature. This article begins to explore this topic by studying two urban transport projects in the Chinese city of Dalian. Based on empirical evidence, the article concludes with a number of preliminary but notable differences between Western countries and China in terms of the administrative mechanisms underlying the strategic use of knowledge in policymaking. We found that Chinese institutional incentives with regard to cadre evaluation and promotion channels largely constitute the motivation of politicians to use knowledge strategically. Additionally, the wider social and administrative cultures in China, including a command-and-control tradition and a high level of power distance create a basis for the strategic use of information as well as the manipulation of analytical data.

Consumer Behavior Under Conflicting Information Provided by Interested Parties: Implications for Equilibrium in the Market for Credence Goods.

Incomplete information in food consumption is a relevant topic in agricultural economics. This paper proposes a theoretical model describing consumer behavior, market equilibrium and public intervention in an industry where consumers must rely on the information of interested parties such as producers or associations. We provide simple game theory model showing the link between price competition and the strategic use of information. If information are unverifiable (as in the case of credence attributes) firms may have no incentive to advertise true claims and consumer decisions may be biased. Our model incorporates the opportunistic behavior of self-interested information providers. The result is a model of competition in prices and information finding a potential for market failure and public intervention. In the paper we discuss the efficiency of three possible regulations: banning false claims, subsidizing advertising campaigns, and public statement if favor of true claims. In that context, some recent patents related to both the regulatory compliance in communication and to the reduction of asymmetric information between producers and consumers have been considered. Finally, we found that the efficiency of these policy tools is affected by the reputation of trustworthiness of the firms.