Open source communities have been of great interest for researchers recently, yet little can be agreed upon when it comes to developers motives. While it has been shown that participants are mostly driven to contribute based on work related needs, it has also been shown that they contribute to fulfill an ideological purpose. We believe that the majority of participants contribute to satisfy the...

To date, there is little in the way of theorizing or empirical work on the imagined endpoint of political action aimed at social change – the type of “dream” those engaged in action are attempting to bring into fruition. We suggest that previous approaches have focused narrowly on one type of social change – amelioration of collective grievances. In contrast, we argue that social change is much...

Introduction The 2012 National Strategy for Biosurveillance1 calls for improved integration, synchronization, and coordination of national biosurveillance activities and acknowledges the benefits of collective knowledge through sharing and receiving of biosurveillance information via strengthened partnerships amongst international, federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, private sector, non...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted at the turn of the century, represented a milestone in global development by committing United Nations member states to eradicating extreme poverty and achieving specific targets over the subsequent decade and a half. At this time the world's attention is increasingly focused on the post-2015 development agenda, which will be unveiled in Septembe...

This paper presents a novel class of self-organizing sensing agents that form a swarm and learn the static spatial process of interest through noisy measurements from neighbors for various global goals. The spatial phenomenon of interest is modeled by a Gaussian process. Each sensing agent maintains its own prediction of the Gaussian process based on measurements from neighbors. A set of biolog...

In September 2015, nearly 200 nations adopted the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) as a transformative, universal framework to address three interwoven dimensions of our global existence—people, planet, and prosperity. They are predicated on the notion that sustainability is not just an aspiration but a necessity. However, by substantially expanding on the scope and targets of their pred...

Organizing is important in computational systems, just as it is important in human systems. Organizational knowledge allows a computational system to recognize its role, and the roles of others, in accomplishing collective goals. However, as circumstances change, often organizational structures must change also. It is therefore important to understand how different organizations can be designed...

a r t i c l e i n f o The decentralization of resource property rights has become an increasingly popular policy in many natural resource-dependent communities of the developing world. However, the success of this policy approach depends on both collective action and institutionalization. It is therefore important to evaluate collective action and insti-tutionalization where the process of prop...

Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for socia...