Amid a growing global forced displacement crisis, refugees and the organizations that assist them have turned to technology as an important resource in solving problems in humanitarian settings. This report analyzes technology uses, needs, and gaps, as well as opportunities for better using technology to help displaced people and improving the operations of responding agencies.

A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century. Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

Volume 1 (A and B) covers international organizations throughout the world, comprising their aims, activities and events.

Governing Cross-Border Data Flows explores how the European Union can simultaneously reconcile and pursue two important legal and policy objectives, namely: protecting fundamental rights guaranteed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter) concerning privacy and personal data, while also maintaining and developing a binding, rules-based global trading system to ensure appropriate access to foreign digital markets for EU businesses. The book demonstrates a significant conflict between international trade law and European data privacy law when it comes to the governance of cross-border flows of personal data. To resolve the tensions caused by this clash, the book proposes concrete and detailed ways to ameliorate the situation from both ends (international trade and personal data protection), specifically through reforms of both international trade and chapter V of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To explain how such reforms could be effectuated, Yakovleva examines the role of discourse in the evolution of trade law in the last two decades. The book also paves the way for the further research necessary to design a fully-fledged reform proposal of the EU framework for the transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area.

Global competition, shorter product lifecycles and increasingly demanding customers are creating significant pressures for the creation of innovative organizations. By examining eight case studies in various industry sectors in Europe, Australia, Japan and Thailand, this book provides a qualitative explanation of the complex relationships between innovation capability, e-commerce, sustainable development and new product development. The book explores how organizations develop innovation capability through the application of e-commerce, sustainable development-orientation, and new product development in order to gain competitive advantage. This knowledge will help managers, academics and policy-makers understand “what works, and why and how it works” in creating innovation-driven organizations from an international perspective, thereby providing an integrated approach to innovation management./a

The Importance of Cultural Cues in Communication In our increasingly globalized world, understanding cultural cues has never been more critical. But what exactly are cultural cues, and why do they matter so much? Imagine you're at a business meeting in Japan, and you hand over your business card with one hand, barely making eye contact. To you, this might seem perfectly respectful and efficient, but to your Japanese counterparts, it could be perceived as dismissive and unprofessional. This small misstep underscores the importance of understanding and respecting cultural nuances.

Digital cities constitutes a multidisciplinary field of research and development, where researchers, designers and developers of communityware interact and collaborate with social scientists studying the use and effects of these kinds of infrastructures and systems in their local application context. The field is rather young. After the diffusion of ICT in the world of organizations and companies, ICT entered everyday life. And this also influenced ICT research and development. The 1998 Workshop on Communityware and Social Interaction in Kyoto was an early meeting in which this emerging field was discussed. After that, two subsequent Digital Cities workshops were organized in Kyoto, and a third one in Amsterdam. This book is the result of the 3rd Workshop on Digital Cities, which took place September 18–19, 2003 in Amsterdam, in conjunction with the 1st Communities and Technologies Conference. Most of the papers were presented at this workshop, and were revised thoroughly afterwards. Also the case studies of digital cities in Asia, the US, and Europe, included in Part I, were direct offsprings of the Digital Cities Workshops. Together the papers in this volume give an interesting state-of-the-art overview of the field. In total 54 authors from the Americas, from Asia, and from Europe were contributed to this volume. The authors come from Brazil (two), the USA (eleven), China (three), Japan (fourteen), Finland (two), Germany (two), Italy (three), Portugal (two), the Netherlands (eight), and the UK (seven), indicating the international nature of the research field.

There is widespread concern that the Internet is exacerbating inequalities between the information rich and poor.