Gaining public trust, achieving transparency, stimulating innovations, and delivering economic growth have been considered as some of the drivingforces behind Open Data initiatives for government organisations in recent years. Traditionally Open Justice, which refers to making courts and their proceedings …

In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leaves humans behind. Against the techno-utopian …

This entry begins by reviewing the definitions of “human”, “environment” and “dichotomy”, consequently turning to the debates concerning the human–environment relationship. Synthesizing various studies, the capability of advanced tool use; language, hyper-sociality, advanced cognition, morality, civilization, …

This chapter discusses the efforts of community workers to obtain consent in local communities as a basis for taking action on issues that are affecting local people’s lives. Crucial here is that community workers resist the initial urge to settle for consensus and as a consequence limit the possibilities …

In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time …

English -- The impact of residualisation on social work has so far hardly been explored. Based on existing literature and recently started empirical research in Amsterdam we analyze several consequences. Residualisation refers to the process whereby urban social housing is strictly allocated to the lowest …

Interconnecting cyber-physical systems in networks leads to the creation of cyber-physical system-of-systems. In a cyber-physical system-of-systems (CPSoS), systems communicate by exchanging and sharing data and information, which this chapter also refers to as interoperability of information. To ensure …

The term “autonomy” comes from the Greek roots “autos” and “nomos”, which mean “self” and “law” respectively. This survey paper investigates the concept of autonomy in connection with the development of cyber-physical systems. The concept of autonomy refers to a form of self-regulation or self-government …

Western societies are quickly becoming less coherent (Giddens, 1991). As a result it is increasingly unclear how individuals should act in a range of situations or how they may understand themselves. To a certain extent this development towards more diverse perspectives and a broader range of ways to …

In the Netherlands, a growing number of vocational education and training institutions have recently implemented new vocational career guidance practices in their competence-based approaches to learning. Vocational career guidance refers to services intended to assist people, of any age and at any point …