Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / South Africa is committed to accelerating the roll-out of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support development at all levels. E-inclusion intermediaries (e-IIs) are used in the country to bridge the digital divide and to create equal opportunities for citizens to benefit from using ICTs. E-IIs are established mainly in under-resourced communities by private, public and third-sector organisations to provide physical access to ICT services for free or at a very low cost. The aim of e-IIs is to make ICT services affordable for and accessible to marginalised and poor community members, who can use the ICT to support community development. The debate is ongoing regarding the contribution of e-IIs towards community development due to, in part, the lack of quantifiable evidence to support the impact that the e-IIs have on development in the communities. Furthermore, despite the existence of e-IIs in communities, there still are community members who do not use the e-IIs. This has been attributed to the lack of awareness of the e-IIs and the services they provide. This lack of awareness is often blamed on the ineffective communication strategies of e-IIs. E-IIs are accused of relying heavily on traditional communication channels and conventional mass media, which do not share information and create awareness effectively in the communities. The increased uptake of modern technologies, such as the Internet and mobile devices, in South Africa has created new opportunities to communicate with community members to share information and create awareness. Social media, for instance, which are mostly accessed through mobile devices, have made communication more accessible and inexpensive for community members with limited skills and resources. Social media have also become popular among development actors in their attempt to direct policy, create awareness and garner community members’ support for development interventions. Arguably, e-IIs could also benefit from using social media, which have become popular in some communities, to communicate with community members in order to create awareness of the e-IIs, the services they provide and the benefits of using ICTs to support community development. The investigation undertaken in this study was twofold. Firstly, the quick-scan analysis method was used to analyse fifty e-IIs. Using this method it was possible to explore the services that are provided by e-IIs as well as how e-IIs communicate with community members and other development actors. Secondly, using six in-depth case studies this study further investigated how e-IIs’ services support community development and how the e-IIs communicate for development, paying special attention to their use of social media.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karolinska institutet, 2006. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 144-154). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics & Psychology, Department of Linguistics, 2005. / Bibliography: p. 329-355.

The Myanmar Peace Support Initiative (MPSI) was a program launched in March 2012, following a request from the government of Myanmar to the government of Norway to lead international support to the Myanmar peace process. The initiative was implemented over a period of three years bringing together and facilitating collaboration amongst various stakeholders in the peace process. The focus of this research was a case study that analyzed to what extent the MPSI, and more specifically the community consultation mechanism of MPSI, was able to successfully incorporate the key aspects of communication for development. The method or approach used consisted of conducting a thorough document analysis, in depth focus interviews, and some limited observations. The study concluded that some limited elements of behavior change communication were incorporated into the MPSI but this was done more by the different partner organizations than by the MPSI mechanism itself. Communication for social change and communication for advocacy were central components of the MPSI initiative, including cross cutting issues. Factors to strengthen and enable communication however were conspicuously lacking which hindered the further expansion and success of the project. This research has assessed the impact / effectiveness of the community consultations implemented by the Myanmar Peace Support Initiative (MPSI) was proportional to the extent that the initiative was able to incorporate the specific communications for development elements as defined by the UN and used as a standard measurement tool to define the elements from a unified developmental perspective. These findings could also potentially be generalized in order to improve the implementation of similar projects in other future peace support contexts that involve international governmental and organizational support.

This Degree Project (DP) deals with the discourses about collective memory in Chile 45 years after a coup d’état that gave way to a dictatorship that lasted for 17 years, during which serious human rights violations were committed. How different actors relate to this traumatic period shows how this is a field of struggle in contemporary Chile.Collective memory has become a key theoretical concept for describing how social groups make sense of their common past. It is deeply entrenched with notions of identity, agency and change. Whereas collective memory is an abstract notion, it has to be somehow concretized in order to allow individuals to activate their own memories, opinions and reactions. Thus, media play a fundamental role in the construction of collective memory. Drawing on a constructivist approach, media are not fixed containers of memories but they actually work on how people perceive their past in relation to the present and the future. This (DP) focuses on the following questions: How do media contribute to the construction of the collective memory around the coup d’état and the military dictatorship in Chile? What are the discourses they diffuse and to what end? Which are the other counter-hegemonic discourses available in the Chilean society?In order to answer these questions, this DP uses a Critical Discourse Analysis of of the two main Chilean newspapers (La Tercera and El Mercurio) complemented with interviews to memory agents. The conclusions point out that these newspapers have a role in diffusing as well as constructing hegemonic discourses around this period of the Chilean history. They do so, mainly by silencing the voices of the civil society making their goals of social change difficult to achieve.

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) ermöglichen die Erstellung von leistungsfähigen, mehrschichtigen Client/Server-Anwendungen auf Basis der Programmiersprache Java. Eine grundlegende und wichtige Entscheidung, die häufig unterschätzt wird, ist die Art und Weise, wie Daten zwischen komplexen Java-Clients (Fat-Clients) und Servern transportiert werden sollen. Während der Implementierung kann ein fehlendes Konzept zur Übertragung von Daten dazu führen, daß Entwickler unterschiedliche Verfahren wählen, die verschiedenen Anforderungen an die Anwendung, wie z.B. ein möglichst gutes Leistungsverhalten, widersprechen und evtl. unter hohem Aufwand rückgängig zu machen sind. Verschiedene Übertragungsverfahren erschweren außerdem die Erweiterung und Wartung des Systems, da zu analysieren ist, wie in verschiedenen Fällen die Datenübertragung gelöst wird. In diesem Beitrag werden deshalb neue Vorgehensweisen vorgestellt, um Daten zwischen einer objektorientierten Applikationsschicht, die sich auf dem Server befindet, und den Clients zu übertragen. Aktive Daten-Container (ADCs) stellen einen einheitlichen Transportmechanismus bereit, der zusätzliche Funktionalität besitzt, um die Datenübertragung zu optimieren. Dazu gehört z.B. der automatische Datenaustausch mit Geschäftsobjekten, um das manuelle Beschreiben und Auslesen des Daten-Containers durch den Anwendungsentwickler einzusparen. Zusätzlich wird die Optimierung des Datenübertragungsvorgangs im Sinne des Leistungsverhaltens angestrebt. ADCs sind sehr flexibel und können in der Anwendungsentwicklung als universelles und zentral zur Verfügung gestelltes Datenübertragungskonzept dienen. Eine Untersuchung des Leistungsverhaltens zeigt, daß mit den vorliegenden Konzepten der Transaktionsdurchsatz hinsichtlich der Kommunikation bis zum Faktor 8 gesteigert werden kann. Im Rahmen eines Industrieprojekts konnte mit Hilfe der Konzepte Entwicklungsaufwand im Umfang von ca. 18% der erforderlichen Codezeilen einer komplexen Anwendung eingespart werden.

This thesis follows previous works of our group (Rieger T. et al., 2008; Cepl J. et al., 2010 and Patkova I. et al., 2012), where we focused on the morphology of the bacterial colonies Serratia marcescens and its variety caused by changing of the inoculation conditions on nutrient agar. When bacterial colonies S. marcescens are grown on nutrient agar enriched with glucose isolated enough from other colonies in its living space, it can form coloured structured colonies, which we named morphotype "fountain" (F). This morpotype becomes ideal for following studies of mutual influencing of the bacterial colonies, because of its ability of pigmentation change or structure loss caused by altering surrounding inoculation conditions. We noticed in normal sowed agar plates, that bacterial colonies, which grows in the close distance with other colonies develop their pigmentation sooner, than colonies, that grows more isolated. We studied how is this influencing happening and what are the necessary conditions for it. We proved, that different species of bacterial macrocolonies (S. marcescens - morphotype (M), S. rubidea and E. coli) emits into the nutrient agar informative signal, which makes the recipient colonies S. marcescens reacts on this signal with the same manner (X structure). It looks, that this is...

Development communication campaigns are often carried out to look good and remain ascribed to what has been referred by some authors as communication about development, where communication actions tend to remain a one-way process to legitimize donors’ accountability and promote visible deliverables.  Communication for development (C4D) is understood as a powerful tool that will give voice to the marginalised, opening up for a much wider participation of people to decision making processes and choices that could affect their lives, directly promoting good governance.  This degree project looks at how C4D has been utilised by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in its development interventions and in one communication campaign, in order to answer the main research question of the project: to what extent C4D can lead to a more inclusive development communication? In particular, this project will look more closely at a case study, a recent communication campaign jointly developed by the African Union, the European Union and UNICEF called #YourVoiceYourFuture. Through qualitative interviews with UNICEF staff working on communication and C4D and the analysis of the case study #YourVoiceYourFuture campaign, this degree project tries to investigate how UNICEF has continued including C4D principles in its interventions. Moreover, through the case study analysis, this degree project will look at how C4D principles can be embedded in development communication actions in order to create more inclusive campaigns, with a wider impact and a higher chance to promote social change.    The case study will also show that in order to increase the reach of the campaign, UNICEF’s use of U-Report was instrumental to create an ‘invited space’. Thanks to U-Report, a two-way engagement with the audience was established, sharing young people’s opinions in Africa and Europe and giving them a voice and allowing them to influence political outcomes at the AU-EU Summit in February 2022. The degree project will conclude by recommending that future communication campaigns should consider including C4D principles in their making, in order engage better with audiences and lead to more inclusive results.

The City of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, has high ambitions when it comes to inclusion and participation from local businesses and universities, NGOs and citizens. The decision to democratize management and to change the city’s processes towards working on (more) equal terms with relevant actors, was made by the City Council in 2014 as a step towards a socially sustainable development. The City Planning Office of Malmö has the main responsibility for city developing projects. One of the city’s current developing projects is called Amiralsstaden, defined as a geographical area and a development process. The ambition of the project is to “through broad participation and co-creation, improve the city- and living environment and investigate how new housing and new businesses can be established” (malmo.se 2018: a) The project focuses on creating new ways of working with physical planning and to create new models for participation (Reflecting Paper 2018). Since 2017, Amiralsstaden has facilitated two different participatory communication processes for development. Communication for Development scholar, Linje Manyozo (2012:222), argues that development communication no longer is a question of relevant technology or local contexts, nor a question of top-down or bottom-up approaches. Instead, he says, it is a question of how power figures in the political economy of both development and communication. A key indicator of whether media and communication for development interventions have played a critical role in society should therefore revolve around an understanding of how power has been negotiated and contested in favour of people. With Amiralsstaden as case study, this thesis sets out to explore how the ambitions of participation on policy level translate into ‘real world’ city planning and what impact it has on development. More specifically, I want to know how citizen participation in communication processes for development is practiced, experienced and what these processes lead to in terms of results and outcome for the city and for the participants. The study is based on qualitative research methodologies, mainly in-depth interviews and observations. Concepts related to participation, such as power, voice, and representation, are in focus to analyse and understand participatory processes and how they contribute to city development.