There is no crisis of civic participation: The Big Society risks undermining the integrity of both state and civil society

David Cameron’s Big Society idea is ambitious but its implications are far from straightforward. David Lewis argues that the government’s attempt to reshape relationships between citizens, state, and market may rapidly become a political liability and burden voluntary groups and charities with responsibilities that they may be unable to deliver on

Multi-service management in a multi-provider environment

As the spread of digital networks makes access to data communications globally available, the interest of communication service providers is switching away from the provision of these bearer networks and towards the provision of the value added services that will operate over them. At the same time the liberalisation of telecommunication markets is precipitating a dramatic change in the profile of communication service providers. In this complex telecommunications markets the open management, not only of the networks, but of the services themselves will become increasingly important. The large number and diversity of roles of the market players makes the management of inter-organisational relationships fundamentally important to the management of services. The ITU's series of recommendations on the telecommunication management network (TMN) provides a basis for inter-domain management, however, this and other standards have so far concentrated on the management of individual network components and of networks operated by single organisations. This paper provides an initial example of how the management of multiple services in a complex multi-player market can be modelled using TMN techniques for implementation on existing management platforms. The paper begins by briefly outlining current work in this field before describing aspects of this multi-player multi-service management problem and how they can be modelled and implemented in a real system

Using Program Synthesis for Program Analysis

In this paper, we identify a fragment of second-order logic with restricted quantification that is expressive enough to capture numerous static analysis problems (e.g. safety proving, bug finding, termination and non-termination proving, superoptimisation). We call this fragment the {\it synthesis fragment}. Satisfiability of a formula in the synthesis fragment is decidable over finite domains; specifically the decision problem is NEXPTIME-complete. If a formula in this fragment is satisfiable, a solution consists of a satisfying assignment from the second order variables to \emph{functions over finite domains}. To concretely find these solutions, we synthesise \emph{programs} that compute the functions. Our program synthesis algorithm is complete for finite state programs, i.e. every \emph{function} over finite domains is computed by some \emph{program} that we can synthesise. We can therefore use our synthesiser as a decision procedure for the synthesis fragment of second-order logic, which in turn allows us to use it as a powerful backend for many program analysis tasks. To show the tractability of our approach, we evaluate the program synthesiser on several static analysis problems.Comment: 19 pages, to appear in LPAR 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1409.492

Resolving whistleblowing disputes in the public interest: is tribunal adjudication the best that can be offered?

This article argues that employment tribunal adjudication may be both a difficult and ineffective mechanism for resolving whistleblowing disputes. The author asserts that, if disclosures of serious wrongdoing are to be encouraged, both the law and dispute resolution mechanisms need to be improved. Ideally, employers should have whistleblowing procedures which provide for conciliation, mediation and arbitration as alternative forms of redress for those who feel that their disclosures have not been dealt with properly or have allegedly suffered retaliation. Recognising that a legal obligation to have effective whistleblowing arrangements is unlikely to be imposed by law, the author suggests that alternative dispute resolution mechanisms should be made available where whistleblowing claims are lodged with employment tribunals