Mapping the Collaborative Platform Economy Business Practice

This study aims to develop a typological configuration that characterizes the full spectrum of collaborative platform economy business practice in the real world. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a large-scale data set which contains information on 1,335 representative platforms in more than 60 countries on five continents, covering almost all collaborative platform economy business practices mentioned in academic journals and public media. Leveraging the k-means clustering method, an empirical typology comprising seven categories of collaborative platform economy business practice is proposed: collaborative support platform, resource supply platform, authentic C2C platform, C2C mutualized mobility platform, hybrid service platform, B2C service platforms, collaborative finance platform. In addition, with the help of operating status data of the collaborative platform economy, a cross-comparative analysis was also carried out on the category differences and geographic differences.

Student Voices on the Use of International Telecollaboration and Sustainability During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown up many challenges to international cooperation, to the promotion of sustainable development, and indeed, to education. This chapter describes a telecollaborative project between university students in Japan and China. The students planned, wrote, recorded, and produced video podcasts on the theme of sustainable development, which were then exchanged via a password-protected, online, collaborative platform. On completion of the project, students wrote reflective essays, which are used here to gain insights into their impressions of topics such as sustainable development and telecollaboration. Results indicate that students improved their understanding of sustainability in addition to developing video editing and podcasting production skills. They also improved their pronunciation as well as other English skills. Overall, they were proud of their podcasts and enjoyed collaborating online with students from another country.

Social Impacts of Blockchain Innovations in the Malaysian Socio-Economic Transformation 2030

This chapter highlights the challenges, opportunities, and social impacts of blockchain technology in the creation of a vibrant STIE ecosystem for Malaysia. As a systemic approach, the 10-10 Malaysian Science, Technology, Innovation, and Economy (10-10 MySTIE) Framework outlines the applications of blockchain vis-à-vis nine other technologies in 10 socio-economic sectors or Malaysian Grand Challenges (MGC). As Malaysia embarks on socio-economic transformation into a knowledge-intensive economy by 2030, five challenges must be addressed before leveraging on the opportunities presented by blockchain innovations in the MGCs. The economic and social impacts of blockchain as a catch-up or leap-frogging technology can be further explored to raise the return on value and competitiveness in the corresponding 30 national niche areas. In conclusion, readers may benefit from experiential learning using the process flow for ecosystem development and templates for 8i ecosystem and collaborative platform for carbon footprint using blockchain innovations.

An Infrastructure for Collaborative Ontology Development

Collaborative development of a shared or standardized ontology presents unique issues in workflow, version control, testing, and quality control. These challenges are similar to challenges faced in large-scale collaborative software development. We have taken this idea as the basis of a collaborative ontology development platform based on familiar software tools, including Continuous Integration platforms, version control systems, testing platforms, and review workflows. We have implemented these using open-source versions of each of these tools, and packaged them into a full-service collaborative platform for collaborative ontology development. This platform has been used in the development of FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology, an ongoing collaborative effort that has been developing and maintaining a set of ontologies for over a decade. The platform is open-source and is being used in other projects beyond FIBO. We hope to continue this trend and improve the state of practice of collaborative ontology design in many more industries.

Professionalization tools: impact of the game-based website ‘Check your Smile’ on specialized terminology acquisition

Computer assisted vocabulary learning, i.e. specialized terminology acquisition, is a major tool to learning Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) necessary to students’ professionalization. One current area of research is digital game-based language learning because of its motivating qualities. This paper discusses electronics students’ acquisition of specific vocabulary as related to the free game-based collaborative platform Check Your Smile (CYS), which is entirely devoted to learning LSP terminology. CYS aggregates various types of games that automatically generate individualized game plays, drawing upon a collaboratively constructed multilingual dictionary. The study focuses on multiple variables including attending a selective engineering course taught in English and the language used to teach the mandatory electronics class. Empirical data shows that students having used CYS tend to obtain better vocabulary test scores than students who did not.

Smart and Agile Turnaround Management

Oil&Gas facilities operators are looking for safe and efficient Turnaround cycles with minimum downtime. However planning such project, ensuring availability of materials, of equipment and of skilled personnel, as well as orchestrating the hundreds of processes and stakeholders involved in the execution to keep it on schedule and on budget is a huge and complex challenge. How to handle and take into account what is planned and what is unplanned? A Turnaround project can be managed with similar approach than an EPC (Engineering Procurement Construction) project. It should leverage collaborative best practices developed to handle capital projects. Those practices allow to plan more productively, to execute with agility while taking into account unplanned changes "on the fly" without affecting on-going activities. A digital collaborative platform enables integrated knowledge as well as real-time visibility into every aspect of the Turnaround. It provides seamless collaboration for productive planning and intelligent execution. This is a strategy, which eliminates unproductive tasks and brings stakeholders together in a dynamic, collaborative management system. With better orchestration, plant owners and operators can reduce their planning and preparation workload by around 30% with also positive impact on all subcontractors. With a better seamless execution, plant owners and operators can get things done right the first time and recover to unplanned events. They can reduce the risk to be out of schedule and keep on track with more margin. They can even reduce the execution time by up to 5% in some situation. Finally, it enforces the reuse of insights that are gathered along Turnarounds to improve safety and extend by 20% the cycle in future Turnaround. A 3D collaborative platform provides an easy to use single source of truth to manage and monitor a Turnaround. Using such 3D environment, one can quickly identify the location of an issue where potential bottlenecks occur, and get access to any relevant vendor's specification, inspection or maintenance history report. Such 3D platform can also help to easily track with color-coding the leak test results of the many joints and their potential disturbances after Turnaround inspection.

Incubating Constructionist Ideas: Co-creating a Taos Institute Writing Community

This article is an article within an article. We (Haesun Moon, Paloma Torres-Dávila and Kristin Bodiford) are interested in broadening the Taos Institute’s impact beyond academic spaces and are exploring co-creating a Taos Institute Publication in Medium, a collaborative platform that offers shared space for relevant stories.

Exploring Organization through Contributions

This chapter focuses on peer-production as a form of collaborative digital work, closely allied to crowdsourcing and other contemporary working practices that are mediated by digital platforms. Such platforms are a growing form of digital work; however, they raise complex methodological issues. First, although often a single collaborative platform coordinates groups, work can be distributed globally. Second, multimodal approaches require the researcher to transition between online and offline media. Finally, it can be challenging to identify what is ‘work’ as activity boundaries are blurred. It is argued that the use of Activity Theory overcomes some of these issues and its utility in an analysis of the production of the open source software, Drupal, is demonstrated, highlighting the potential for Activity Theory to enable cross-contextual comparisons and proposing the concept of ‘socio-technical systems of contribution’ as a way to understand interactions between networks of collaboration. The limitations of the approach and potential future developments are noted.

Manual Annotation Studio (MAS): a collaborative platform for manual functional annotation of viral and microbial genomes

Background Functional genome annotation is the process of labelling functional genomic regions with descriptive information. Manual curation can produce higher quality genome annotations than fully automated methods. Manual annotation efforts are time-consuming and complex; however, software can help reduce these drawbacks. Results We created Manual Annotation Studio (MAS) to improve the efficiency of the process of manual functional annotation prokaryotic and viral genomes. MAS allows users to upload unannotated genomes, provides an interface to edit and upload annotations, tracks annotation history and progress, and saves data to a relational database. MAS provides users with pertinent information through a simple point and click interface to execute and visualize results for multiple homology search tools (blastp, rpsblast, and HHsearch) against multiple databases (Swiss-Prot, nr, CDD, PDB, and an internally generated database). MAS was designed to accept connections over the local area network (LAN) of a lab or organization so multiple users can access it simultaneously. MAS can take advantage of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters by interfacing with SGE or SLURM and data can be exported from MAS in a variety of formats (FASTA, GenBank, GFF, and excel). Conclusions MAS streamlines and provides structure to manual functional annotation projects. MAS enhances the ability of users to generate, interpret, and compare results from multiple tools. The structure that MAS provides can improve project organization and reduce annotation errors. MAS is ideal for team-based annotation projects because it facilitates collaboration.