infonet-economy

The Commons discussion proliferates on natural resources and material reproduction. When this discussion happens, it tends to distance itself from the “digital commons”, as the latter should be understood as something different: an area of instability, of undefined laws, or even of abuse. We would like to contribute to a law of the commons discussion with an approach that considers the digital, as a potential state of any resource that can be thought and transcribed under a binary process. In this sense, (de)materialization is never definite or stable, it is, primarily, a view of how differentiation and relationships between private, public and common property are constructed. Our starting point is that debt follows this exact line of thinking: it is, at the same time, material and immaterial, local and transnational, private and public.In sociological theory, all money is debt (Ingham, 2004) and for any debt, the collateral guarantees to the lender that if the debt is not repaid the value of what was lent is not lost. We would like to push this idea further by examining mutual credit, as an endogenous money creation process, particularly under the context of Sardex Mutual Credit System: an electronic B2B mutual credit system that has been operating on the island of Sardinia since 2009 as a complementary currency (Dini, 2016). Although mutual credit is not a “comm ons credit” it is view of how credit commons could be. Revisiting an existing mutual credit system is a first step allowing us to understand Law around financial transactions and debt in its current state. Mutual credit does not oppose or change Law it makes it more livable and functional. Repositioning it in an impossible “networked” state where we are not sure of its transactions, support and motivation, governance, communities assemblage, utility, is an another effort that could help us move beyond the existing Law to a situation where a Law of Commons could emerge. Thus, our objective is to move beyond mutual credit with expected, functional, solutions and venture with the monsters of commoning debt and credit. As Dana Haraway (2016) explains regarding “the embeddedness in an infrastructure that makes the global appear as a work-object”, we can consider mutual credit contributing to such a dominant direction: the existing Law (infrastructure) is acceptable as mutual credit provides individually understood and accepted local solutions, alternative ways to apply and live with it. Credit commons with its open design, its community oriented approach destabilizes this process and recasts debt in the unknown area of a global commons potential: this could be crucial as it would makes us forget the work-object understanding of debt and provide us with an opportunity further explore its commoning process.

Since the early 90’s, three dimensional virtual reality has raised interest as it appeared to allow users to feel immersed in virtual environments. Yet, expensive and cumbersome equipment were required and this technology has never delivered on its promises. In the last two years, affordable head mounted displays, which have very recently, or will very soon be launched on the market, have revived the hope that virtual reality might now really be up for a breakthrough. Although in the early 2000’s research in the use of Virtual Reality in teaching or in Marketing, had shown interesting results, no literature could be found on the sense of being there experienced by users of the new head mounted displays. This research aims at looking into the sense of presence perceived by users of these new affordable devices. It observes that all those who participated in this research experienced a high sense of presence for two different types of devices, and that although on average, participants were only moderately inspired in suggesting possible uses of the technology in the future, marketing students were by far, those who were the most creative. These results are encouraging for the use of this technology for both marketing and marketing teaching.

The first objective of this study was to identify the economic intelligence requirements of two organizations providing support to start-ups in Western Switzerland (Genilem and Fongit) and to define recommendations to address their key issues. The second objective was to identify needs common to the two institutions and to suggest a set of measures that could be used on a regional scale to rationalize the use of resources. Data were collected through about 20 interviews involving both start up managers and collaborators of the coaching companies. A questionnaire has been sent to most of the companies which had received support from these administrative bodies. As a result, 2 lists of about 15 guidelines were given to Genilem and Fongit. Furthermore, practical measures and a better task allocation have been suggested to the regional support partners. Ultimately, this research helped both Fongit and Genilem to improve their practices. It also served to provide a reflection on what should be considered as essential support for entrepreneurship in the cantons of Vaud and Geneva. In addition, the study offers an innovative methodology for the analysis of the need for economic intelligence.

This paper presents the important elements of doctoral research into archival science at the Université de Montréal – Ecole de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de information, about the definition and the measurement of the dimensions of quality applied to historical archives. It focuses mainly on three questions: first, what are intrinsic and extrinsic archival qualities; second, what conceptual framework can integrate and structure various dimensions of intrinsic and extrinsic qualities of archival documents; third, which indicators and variables should be tested to verify the measurability of these qualities. After developing a conceptual framework distinguishing four dimensions of quality of archives, a quantitative and descriptive study was conducted to confirm the measurability of fourteen variables of two of these four dimensions that were measured: the credible evidence as an intrinsic dimension example and the exploitability as an extrinsic dimension example.

The demand forecast is the most influential input into enterprise activities planning thus creating a challenging issue for Demand Planning experts in model selection. Models including quantitative, qualitative and hybrid forecasting methods have been developed and are widely used. The literature reveals the use of several case-dependent error measures to evaluate forecasting accuracy, however, these performance indicators may at times differentiate in results making it more difficult in determining the most appropriate forecasting model for the users’ needs. This paper presents the development of two hybrid multi-criteria decision making approaches, AHP-TOPSIS and ANP-TOPSIS, to evaluate and rank the relative performances based on error measures of alternate forecasting models. Validation is provided through an industrial application using empirical data from a plastic bag manufacturer based on five models