陳瑞奇: October 2009

October 24, 2009

Action Science Approach to Experimenting Nonprofit

Persons with mental impairments tend to be viewed as unemployable and systematically excluded from labor markets. This research try to find how to unleash the power of Web2.0 to assist people with mental disabilities and their caregivers. Because Web 2.0 removes maintenance and financial burdens from NPOs and adds usability in the meanwhile. Web 2.0 based architecture for nonprofit organizations (Fig.1).

Figure 1.

This system use a discussion board is to fast disseminate time-sensitive job information to colleague job coaches. The effectiveness of knowledge sharing discussion create some result : the average number of messages per subject was 2.32 with standard deviation (SD) equal to 2.34. It was found that the average number of members involved in an initiated subject was 1.8 with SD= 1.5, which meant initiated subjects got replies in return with 80% of probability. We were also noted by the fact that the average time span of a subject was 42.6 hours (SD=50.0), compared to 2 weeks in maximum and 1 week in average thatused to be required for receiving updated job bulletins. Therefore, the reduction in the time to disseminate job information was accomplished by 75%. It's mean that the system has been built and tested by the job coaches with significant success.

Action Science Approach to Nonprofit Housing Services

In this research, Yao-Jen Chang, Hsin-Yu Hsu, Tsen-Yung Wang try to find how to unleash the power of Web2.0, and map mash-up services in particular for the organization who actually was ahead in applying Internet technology to providing housing information for people seeking to rent apartments. Research methodologies of action science including in-depth interview, field study, focused group, and participant observation [2, 3, 6] are adopted to collect data to analyze the needs of the front-line users. So it is a natural and good choice of conducting the organizational Web renovation project, people in social services and information systems can speak the same language Architecture of this system includes: (1) Context manager, (2) Map Service, (3) Database, (4) Matchmaker, and (5) SMS Service. Matchmaker is used for to record a user’s selections preference enables the matching module to be personalized to a user’s likings, which are essential in the housing applications. Resource Description Framework (RDF) has come to be used as a general method of modeling information, through a variety of syntax formats. RDFS has made the knowledge presentation more cohesive and flexible. The result of this researh (in context-aware capabilities and personalized matching) for 4 section include Map GUI, User Survey, Stress Test, and Diffusion of Innovations has been built and tested with significant success.

Taxonomy of cloud computing and the major industry players

Cloud computing is becoming important for very massive messaging systems, such as Gmail and Microsoft Exchange Online. “cloud” refers to the public Internet. So “cloud computing” refers to computing cycles delivered over the public Internet. As we can see the picture below at Peter Laird blog about Cloud Computing taxonomy:

Descriptions of the Buckets:

To provide some insight into what each bucket means, listed below are descriptions.

Infrastructure

Public Clouds – the poster children of Cloud Computing. These vendors offer computers as a service. If you need 50 computers in 15 minutes, these guys will take care of that. Differentiators include the provisioning model (virtualized instances vs. actual machines) and the host OS versions that are supported.
Private Clouds – these solutions help enterprises build private clouds within the firewall. If privacy and control is a big concern, or you want to increase utilization in an existing data center, a private cloud may be what you want.
Compute and Data Grids – while these solutions are also useful outside of a cloud, they can play an important role for applications that are deployed within a cloud. The key difference with Cloud applications from traditional on-premise applications is in how they must scale. With an on-premise application, you can scale vertically when the load gets too high – by buying a bigger machine. In the cloud, applications must scale horizontally – by adding more machines in a cluster. Compute and Data Grid products can help achieve horizontal scalability.
Virtualization and Appliances – when deploying OS stacks to public and private clouds, you will find it helpful to have a library of virtualized OS images. The vendors in these buckets will help in this area. Also, depending on the cloud being used, any number of Virtualization technologies will be used.

Platform

Business User Platforms – these platforms are cloud based application development environments. The focus of these platforms are on non-programmers as the application developers. To make this happen, these platforms offer rich visual tools to enable the developers to define data models and application logic. The differentiators for these platforms are their features – which is important to investigate during software selection as there is no coding allowed, so developers cannot code around feature outages.
Developer Platforms – these platforms are cloud based application development environments that support custom coding. Developers can build highly customized applications with these platforms, without having to worry about scalability, OS configuration, load balancing, operations, etc as they would with a public cloud offering. The differentiators for these platforms include the supported programming languages (Java, python, custom, etc), and data storage capabilities (RDMBS, key-value stores, etc).

Services

Storage – these vendors offer hosted storage that are API accessible. Meaning, any application can get/set objects into these Cloud storage solutions. The solutions vary in the supported data access models – key-value stores, file stores, etc.
Integration – solutions that provide integration facilities between multiple Cloud applications, or Cloud applications with on-premise applications. Major features offered are: messaging queues, business process modeling (BPM), and application adapters (like NetSuite adapter, SAP adapter).
Metering and Billing – building your own billing and invoicing system is highly discouraged. This is a great operation to outsource to a specialist. These vendors offer expertise in how to structure billing plans, plus all of the back office capabilities behind invoicing and collection. By outsourcing to one of these PCI compliant vendors, you will reduce the level of compliance your Cloud application will need to attain.
Security – The Cloud infrastructure and platform vendors must provide security, and so a base level can be assumed. But for value-add features, like application authorization features, encryption, and Single Sign On capabilities across multiple applications – look to these vendors.
Fabric Management – this is a space that evolves quickly, so you will need to keep up to date on new developments with these vendors. Generally, these vendors help you manage and deploy your application in the Cloud. This varies from features that allow you to design a virtual data center in a cloud, to auto-scaling an application when load increases, to monitoring Cloud servers to restart them if they fail.

Applications

SaaS – these vendors represent the ultimate end-game to all of this – Cloud based applications. There are thousands of them, and are traditionally known as Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. SaaS applications are available over the internet, are quick to provision a new account, are offered in a pay-as-you-go model, and allow some level of customization. NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Taleo, Concur, Workday and many others have established the space as a viable way to deliver software.

Source :
http://www.ferris.com/?p=321814
http://peterlaird.blogspot.com/2008/09/visual-map-of-cloud-computingsaaspaas.html