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The purpose of this paper is to carry out a detailed investigation of the mechanisms operating during decision making by the honey bee swarm, which is now considered to be one of the best examples of collective decision making outside the human domain.

This investigation is based on a review of the last 60 years’ published literature about swarm behaviour. It introduces a different perspective to the work by utilising a cybernetic model of a self-organising information network to analyse the findings of this body of research.

Scout bees evaluating potential nest sites accumulated support for their site by differential net recruitment, so the total scout numbers present at each site was a good measure of the total evidence in favour of the site and hence the relative probability of choosing it as the swarm’s new home. The accumulation of evidence continued at a number of alternative nest site locations until a critical quorum threshold was sensed at one of them. The first alternative to reach the threshold was chosen as the preferred nest site. Quorum scouts then prepared the swarm for departure and steered it to its new home.

Swarm decision making has not been modelled as a self-organising information network before. This novel approach reveals how a combination of network modifications, self-amplification, self-attenuation, cross-inhibition, integration and quorum mechanisms together contribute towards accurate group decision making.

Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of scholarship that build on Knight’s contributions, assessing which of his insights were absorbed by different subfields and how these have been connected to recent topics and concerns. The authors then qualitatively explore these results to throw new light on the recent history of institutional economics, using Knight’s RUP as a window into the evolution of (and inter-relations between) different research traditions that currently populate the field, including new economic sociology, comparative politics, evolutionary economics, entrepreneurial studies, environmental social sciences, international political economy, and the anthropology of finance. The authors conclude that Knight’s legacy remains unsettled, with different groups selectively absorbing a subset of his ideas and developing them in relative isolation from research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, boundary work connecting these separate areas reveals possible spaces for collaboration among scholars who study institutions building explicitly on Knightian insights.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a viable system, the honey bee swarm, gathers meaningful information about potential new nest sites in its problematic environment.

This investigation uses a cybernetic model of a self-organising information network to analyse the findings from the last 60 years published research on swarm behaviour.

Nest site scouts used a modified foraging network to carry out a very thorough survey of the swarm’s problematic environment, providing the swarm with a considerable diversity of potential nest sites for consideration. The swarm utilised a number of randomly recruited groups of scouts to obtain numerous independent opinions about potential nest sites, each privately evaluated, publicly reported and repeatedly tested by new recruits. Independent evaluation of site quality was balanced by interdependent reporting of site location. Noise was reduced by integration over a large number of individual scouts and over a period of time. The swarm was therefore able to reduce potential sources of bias, distortion and noise, providing it with comparatively reliable information for decision making.

Information gathering by a honey bee swarm has not previously been modelled as a self-organising information network. The findings may be of value to human decision-making groups.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theory of sovereign entrepreneurship, which is a special kind of political entrepreneurship.

This paper uses qualitative methods/historical survey.

Sovereignty is rooted in self-enforced exchange of political property rights. Sovereign entrepreneurship is the creative employment of political property rights to advance a plan.

Because a polity’s constitution is determined by its distribution of political property rights, sovereign entrepreneurship and constitutional change are necessarily linked. The author illustrated how sovereign entrepreneurship can be applied by using it to explain the rise of modern states.

In addition to studying instances of sovereign entrepreneurship in distant history, scholars can apply it to recent history. Sovereign entrepreneurship can be especially helpful as a tool for doing analytic narratives of low-n cases of political-economic development, especially when those polities attract interests for being “development miracles.”

This paper uses treats sovereignty as a political property right.

This paper aims to report the deployment of open source electronic content management software in national government departments in South Africa, with the view to raise awareness of the free and open source software (FOSS) policy. Many countries including South Africa have developed policies that encourage the deployment of free and open source software (FOSS).

The paper opted for qualitative data collected through interviews with four chief information officers, five information technology (IT) officials, two records managers from government departments, one archivist from the National Archives of South Africa and one IT official from the State Information Technology Agency; these were selected purposively from national government departments. Furthermore, a free test trial of open source software, Alfresco Community Edition, was conducted for a 30-day period during September 2013. Alfresco was chosen as it is the preferred FOSS in government departments in South Africa.

The key finding reveals that, in contrast with the FOSS policy, governmental bodies in South Africa preferred proprietary software over FOSS, as only one government department has migrated to FOSS. The reasons cited for the low uptake of open source electronic content management include the perceived lack of support for FOSS or short lifespan support which was confirmed through the trial test, as well as a lack of IT skills by records management practitioners who are responsible for implementation of electronic content management and hidden costs as the internal staff would spend time supporting, tailoring and enhancing the software. It is observed that failure to raise awareness and benefits of the FOSS policy in South Africa will curtail the document into a dull epistle.

Due to the chosen research approach and sampling method, the results were not generalised to the population. It is hoped that the study will stimulate further research interest and raise awareness in government departments with regard to FOSS policy implementation, especially in the area of electronic content management.

The paper shows the difficulty in implementing a policy and putting it into practice without looking into its practical feasibility.

This research attempts to bridge the gap and bring new elements by assessing the level of FOSS adoption in the area of electronic content management which is often ignored by the government and also less researched by scholars.

This study aims to explore the feasible use of free and open source software (FOSS) at a policy level in South Korea, which is reacting against being locked into only one technology company, Microsoft.

Based on participatory democratic theory, this paper suggests that the normative role of the state is as a public mediator in the development of an information technology (IT) infrastructure, encouraging greater freedom of choice and the establishment of an electronic environment – such as the community‐based use of software technology – for citizens to use easily and freely.

South Korean policymakers have explored FOSS as a kind of a political metaphor: at the international level, FOSS offers a rare opportunity to free the country from its technological dependence on transnational software vendors. At the national level, it is an engine for technological innovation and for market competition. However, the market or business paradigm has dominated most discussions of FOSS in Korea. As a result, the economic paradigm of FOSS is vulnerable and could easily surrender to the proprietary logic of the software market.

This study describes how the Korean government must maximize the societal benefits of FOSS within the public sector in order to reduce reliance on proprietary software and open the developmental path to alternative technologies.

Free and open source software (FOSS) brings many benefits to digital preservation; however it is not “free”. If the context in which free and open source software tools are created and employed is examined, it becomes clear that: the sustainability of any software (FOSS, custom or commercial) to ensure the preservation of the digital heritage will depend on careful assessment of, and provision for, the costs (implicit and explicit) entailed in the production and continued employment of these tools. The purpose of this paper is to focus on FOSS and archiving of the digital heritage.

Portico, a not‐for‐profit digital preservation service, explores the costs of FOSS based on its experiences as a working archive with an extremely long time horizon.

There are considerable benefits to FOSS, including its openness and the broad‐based testing of it in real‐world situations. FOSS tools can provide considerable cost savings over proprietary tools. However, FOSS is neither free to use, nor to create, nor to maintain. Digital preservation organizations must inventory not only the FOSS tools in the preservation arsenal, but the network of sustaining tools (FOSS and otherwise), documentation, and “tribal knowledge” that make these tools effectively usable. The risks to sustainability of this network of resources must be assessed, and determine what it will cost to keep them viable. Strategies will have to be considered and implemented for providing the means to sustain these resources. An engaged community of use is the best guarantor of the vitality of any FOSS tool. As that community wanes, it becomes even more essential to capture the significant properties and domain knowledge about that tool. Creators of new software in the digital preservation space have a particular obligation to provide and maintain information about the significant properties of that software.

The paper shows how Portico brings its practical experiences integrating multiple FOSS tools to bear on an analysis of the costs to creating and maintaining these tools over the long‐term.

Free Open Source Softwares (FOSS) witnessed the development of many very good alternatives to proprietary softwares. These free softwares can be localized in several local languages. This paper aims to illustrate a very interesting empirical investigation on FOSS. Several significant benefits of localization are described in introduction and subsequent sections.

Although the localization process is standard and well documented for most of the FOSS, it is a more complex task as it involves coordination among developers, linguists and domain experts. Hence, a very few open source softwares are successfully localized in Indian languages. In this paper, the authors present an approach that they have used for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) software Marathikaran (localization in Marathi language) project of by Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha of Maharashtra Government (RMVS), India.

This localization project has been described by RMVS as a pilot project that would guide such similar localizations in many other Indian languages for other popular open source softwares.

The localization work overcomes the general misconception that regional languages are good only for communication (Boli Bhasha) but cannot be used for dissemination of knowledge (Gyan Bhasha). This work is notably contributing to language preservation, language revitalization and Digital India Initiative.

This work is the pioneering work in this domain for Marathi language with respect to GIMP. The authors presented systematic steps used to localize the GIMP software in Marathi language (from 2% to 100%).

The Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) is a major new collaborative socio‐economic research programme involving five higher education institutions in Wales. This paper introduces the work of the WISERD data integration team and describes their plans for the development of an online geo‐portal. Their aim is to support WISERD researchers by providing a framework for integrating, managing and disseminating quantitative and qualitative socio‐economic data in Wales. This paper outlines the goals of this major project, discusses the concept of the WISERD geo‐portal and reports on initial investigations into geo‐portal development using free and open‐source (FOSS) software. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the future work of the WISERD data integration team.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.