RIVAL at the Royal Society of Edinburgh Awards Reception 2019

The RIVAL poster on display at the Royal Society of Edinburgh Awards Reception 2019

Last week, on Monday 9th September, I participated at the Royal Society of Edinburgh‘s (RSE) Annual Awards Reception. Each year this event provides a snapshot of the creative and innovative projects that are supported by the RSE and its partners: the Scottish Funding Council, Scottish Enterprise, BBSRC, STFC, BP, IBioIC and Fullbright. Continue reading

The nature of risk in the privacy calculus: a risk ontology presented by Dr David Haynes

Dr David Haynes

Dr David Haynes presents his research

Colleagues in the Centre for Social Informatics are delighted that Dr David Haynes – currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at City University – will be joining us as a new lecturer in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University in January 2020.

In preparation for his move to Scotland, David has spent the past few days with us in Edinburgh. As part of this visit, on Friday 30th August David delivered a research seminar on the research that he is undertaking for his postdoctoral fellowship. His project concerns the nature of online risk from the perspective of individuals. Continue reading

Who wants to do a PhD? You do! Apply by Friday 5th July for a funded doctoral study at Edinburgh Napier University

Centre for Social Informatics bannerThe School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University is currently advertising three funded PhD places. Applications are due by Friday 5th July 2019, with the successful applicants embarking on their doctoral studies in academic year 2019/20. The funding includes fees (UK/EU rates) and a stipend (living allowance) at the standard UK rate (currently £15,009 per annum). Continue reading

Tacit knowledge sharing in online environments: paper available on OnlineFirst

Iris Buunk

Iris Buunk

The sixth of the seven articles that I recently co-authored for the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JoLIS) has now been published as an OnlineFirst paper. This is ‘Tacit knowledge sharing in online environments: locating ‘Ba’ within a platform for public sector professionals‘ by Iris Buunk, Colin F. Smith, and Hazel Hall. It reports findings from Iris‘ doctoral study, which I supervise with Colin.

With reference to the concept of Ba (Nonaka and Konno, 1998), and based on empirical research conducted in the UK public sector, we draw two main conclusions in our article. First, online social platforms play a strong role in the facilitation of tacit knowledge sharing, and this leads to outcomes of learning, expertise sharing, problem solving, and innovating. Second, such platforms are important to the initiation of discussions among experts, the fostering of collective intelligence, and making tacit and personal knowledge visible and accessible quickly, with minimal effort. Continue reading

Seven JoLIS paper acceptances for CSI #i3rgu

File:Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.jpgLast summer members of the Centre for Social Informatics delivered nine papers at Information: interactions and impact (i3) 2017. Following the conference, we were given the opportunity to develop this work into submissions for the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JoLIS). We took up this offer by working seven of the nine conference papers up to full journal article manuscripts. These were all submitted by the deadline of September 30th 2017. Following peer review and revisions all seven were accepted, and they will be published in JoLIS in due course. The manuscripts for all accepted articles have now been added to the Edinburgh Napier repository, and can be downloaded by clicking the article titles below. Continue reading

Applications invited for fully-funded PhD studentship on workplace skills development within the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University

ESRC-SDS-Napier studentship logos

We are currently advertising a fully-funded PhD studentship within the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University. (See the advertisement on FindAPhD.com and the studentship details on the Edinburgh Napier University careers pages.)

The title of the doctoral study is Meta-skills maturity for future workplaces.  

  • Applications are due by Friday 30th March 2018.
  • Interviews are scheduled for Wednesday 18th April 2018.
  • The studentship will start on Thursday 1st October 2018.

Continue reading

Centre for Social Informatics at the 18th European Conference on Knowledge Management #ECKM2017

The 18th European Conference on Knowledge Management (#ECKM2017) has been taking place in Barcelona this week at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC).

Today Iris Buunk (one of the PhD students in the Centre for Social Informatics) is presenting a co-authored paper at the conference. Entitled ‘Skills in sight: how social media affordances increase network awareness’ this work examines the extent to which social media afford new capabilities in the sharing of tacit knowledge. The slides for the paper are available on SlideShare, and below.

Skills in sight: how social media affordances increase network awareness #ECKM2017

Iris Buunk

Presenter Iris Buunk

The 18th European Conference on Knowledge Management (#ECKM2017) takes place this year in Barcelona at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC) on 7th and 8th September. ECKM is the longest running academic conference on knowledge management in Europe, attended by academics and practitioners from 40+ countries eager to engage in the packed conference programme.

With my colleagues Iris Buunk and Dr Colin F Smith, I am co-author of one of the papers to be presented at the conference: ‘Skills in sight: how social media affordances increase network awareness’. Continue reading

Demographics of the UK information professions: fact sheets published by CILIP and ARA

This week the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) published a series of 24 fact sheets on the demography of the UK workforce in libraries, archives, records, information management, and knowledge management. The data, presented in the fact sheets by sector and region, derive from the findings of the Workforce Mapping Project.

This project was completed in 2014/15 by an Edinburgh Napier University team that comprised three staff from the Centre for Social Informatics (Hazel Hall, Christine Irving and Bruce Ryan) and three from the Employment Research Institute (Robert Raeside, Tao Chen and Matthew Dutton). In November 2015 CILIP and ARA used data from the final project report to publish the headline findings from the study. Continue reading