(primer párrafo) En el invierno de 2010, el presidente Wubbo de Boer, en compañía de sus directores de departamento y de su equipo de alta dirección, preparaba las cruciales reuniones del Consejo de Administración y del Comité Presupuestario. La oficina de registro de marcas, dibujos y modelos de la Unión Europea, con sede en Alicante, España, pomposamente denominada Oficina de Armonización del Mercado Interior (Marcas, Dibujos y Modelos) (OAMI), había superado todas las expectativas generadas por la creación de la marca comunitaria (MC) y los dibujos o modelos comunitarios registrados (DMCR). El nuevo organismo también podía jactarse de los impresionantes progresos alcanzados en materia de productividad y de transparencia desde que, en el año 1996, iniciase sus actividades de registro de las marcas. Entre 1996 y 2009, los incrementos de productividad habían permitido a la Agencia reducir en casi un 50 % las tasas abonadas por las empresas en concepto de de registro de las marcas, dibujos y modelos. Valiéndose de las innovadoras herramientas de comercio electrónico y de la información basada en Internet, los directivos y el personal de la OAMI se habían esforzado durante más de una década por modernizar y simplificar los procesos aplicados al examen y registro de las marcas y modelos, automatizando enteramente muchas fases del procedimiento. Habían puesto poderosas herramientas de información a disposición de sus «usuarios», término utilizado por la OAMI para designar a los particulares y a las empresas que interactúan con la Agencia, y también a disposición de los propios examinadores de la OAMI, con el fin de mejorar la eficiencia y fiabilidad en la toma de decisiones. Habían analizado el grado de satisfacción de los usuarios y trabajado codo a codo con ellos, a fin de elaborar parámetros de rendimiento y de niveles de servicio que a su vez sirviesen de acicate a la OAMI para mejorar permanentemente sus servicios en lo relativo a puntualidad, calidad y accesibilidad. Habían tenido que enfrentarse también con determinados comportamiento y pautas fuertemente arraigados entre los funcionarios de carrera, introduciendo elementos de flexibilidad como el teletrabajo en las actividades del personal de Alicante, y esforzándose por analizar rigurosamente los métodos operativos, con vistas a mejorar su productividad.

(first paragraph) President Wubbo de Boer and his department directors, his top management team, prepared for critical meetings of the Administrative Board and the Budget Committee in the winter of 2010. The European Union’s trademark and design registration agency in Alicante, Spain, grandly named the Office of Harmonization for the Internal Market (Trade Mark and Design) (OHIM), had exceeded all expectations for the establishment of the Community trade mark (CTM) and the Registered Community design (RCD). The new agency also could be proud of impressive achievements in productivity and transparency since it began registering trademarks in 1996. Through productivity gains, the agency had reduced the fees companies paid to register trademarks and designs by about 50 percent between 1996 and 2009. Through innovative use of e-business tools and web-based information, for more than a decade OHIM managers and staff had worked to transform and simplify the processes used to examine and register trademarks and designs, completely automating many steps in these processes. They had provided powerful information tools for their “users,” OHIM’s term for the individuals and firms that interact with the agency, and for internal OHIM examiners to increase efficiency and reliability of decision making. They had surveyed users and worked closely with them to develop performance measures and service standards that would in turn challenge OHIM to continuously improve its service in terms of timeliness, quality and accessibility. They had even challenged deeply held attitudes and norms of the permanent civil service by building flexibilities including telework into workforce practices in Alicante and by efforts to rigorously examine working methods to improve productivity.

Why do e-government initiatives which are commonly implemented to achieve similar policy goals produce different outcomes in different nations? To answer this question, this paper examines e-government policy structure, which has been regarded as one of the most important institutional arrangements for e-government promotion (European Commission, 2007; Park, 2006; OECD, 2005; Eifert and Puschel, 2004). Specifically, the legal framework, the managerial tools for coordination and control, and the organizational arrangements of the e-government policy structures of the Bush administration in the U.S. and of Roh administration in Korea are compared. Based on such a comparative analysis, this study demonstrates how different institutional arrangements of e-government policy structure influence the different outcomes of BRMs in the two nations.

[first paragraph] Chapter 6 provided an open source project success and abandonment dependent variable. Chapter 7 described data available in the Sourceforge.net repository and linked these data to various independent variable concepts and hypotheses presented in the theoretical part of this book. Chapter 7 also described the Classification Tree and Random Forest statistical approaches we use in this and the following chapter. This chapter presents the results of the Classification Tree analysis for successful and abandoned projects in the Initiation Stage, which in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.2), we defined as the period before and up to the time when a project completes a first release of its software. Readers are encouraged to review Chapter 6 (especially Table 6.1) for specifics on how we operationalized this definition as well as the other Initiation Stage dependent variable categories (e.g., Abandoned in Initiation, Indeterminate in Initiation).

[first paragraph] From the very beginning of this research project, we understood that we needed to define what success meant in open source so that we could use that definition to create a dependent variable for our empirical studies. Does success mean a project has developed high quality software, or does it mean that the software is widely used? How might extremely valuable software that is used by only a few people, such as software for charting parts of the human genome, fit into this definition? In this chapter, we establish a robust success and abandonment measure that satisfies these conditions. We describe the process we went through to create a definition of open source success and abandonment, and how we used that definition to classify nearly all the projects hosted on Sourceforge.net (SF, as of October 2006) as either successful or abandoned.

[first paragraph] Open source research in the late 1990s and early 2000's described open source development projects as all-volunteer endeavors without the existence of monetary incentives (Chakravarty, Haruvy and Wu, 2007), and relatively recent empirical studies (Ghosh, 2005; Wolf {{243}}) confirm that a sizable percentage of open source developers are indeed volunteers.1 Open source development projects involving more than one developer were seen to follow a “hacker ethic” (Himanen, 2000; von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003) where individuals freely give away and exchange software they had written so that it could be modified and built upon, with an expectation of reciprocation. An early puzzle, of particular interest to economists, was why people would voluntarily contribute their ideas and time to these projects (Lerner and Tirole {{243}}. We'll focus on these fine-scale behavioral questions in Chapter 3, and will explain that there are clear reasons – such as distance learning, signaling, enjoyment, and “user-driven innovation” based on a need (von Hippel, 2005) – that motivate these volunteers to participate.

The technological innovations of the last decades have opened the doors to a new and different world for businesses and governments. As access to the Internet penetrates more populations each day, ICTs continue to shape societies all over the world. This presentation will explore the development of ICTs and e-government in Turkey. It will include significant figures and statistics about e-government in Turkey and discuss the social consequences of such developments.

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama during the 2008 elections sparked new discussion about the public engagement issue in the political processes. The campaign used Web 2.0 tools intensively to reach the general public and seek support and collect feedback from voters. In this paper, we analyze the major website of this project, “Organizing for America” (OFA) from the perspective of e-participation, which is a concept that include all the processes of public involvement via information and communication technologies.

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects are a form of commons where individuals work collectively to produce software that is a public, rather than a private, good. The famous phrase “Tragedy of the Commons” describes a situation where a natural resource commons, such as a pasture, or a water supply, gets depleted because of overuse. The tragedy in FLOSS commons is distinctly different -- it occurs when collective action ceases before a software product is produced or reaches its full potential. This paper builds on previous work about defining success in FLOSS projects by taking a collective action perspective. We first report the results of interviews with FLOSS developers regarding our ideas about success and failure in FLOSS projects. Building on those interviews and previous work, we then describe our criteria for defining success/tragedy in FLOSS commons. Finally, we discuss the results of a preliminary classification of nearly all projects hosted on Sourceforge.net as of August 2006. 1.