Chrisanthi Avgerou TC9 chair Professor of Information Systems London School of Economics c.avgerou@lse.ac.uk A conference to honour the professional life of Jacques Berleur has inevitably been a platform for debate on the most fundamental issues that pre-occupy the working groups of the IFIP Technical Committee 9 (TC9) on the 'Relationship between Computers and Society'. Jacques Berleur has of course been one of those few ICT experts who, since the 1970s, has tirelessly worked within the IFIP community to expose the nature of the ethical dilemmas of a society increasingly relying on the...

Open source software (free software) has emerged as a major field of scientific inquiry across a number of disciplines. When the concept of open source began to gain mindshare in the global business community, decision makers faced a challenge: to convert hype and potential into sustainable profit and viable business models.

This volume addresses this challenge through presenting some of the newest, extensively peer-reviewed research in the area.

I am honored to be General Chair for the 2007 (10* DEGREES) Working Conference of IFIP Working Group 8.6.1 had some part in helping with the formation of this working group. Participating in this conference in Manchester reflects my interest in the working group and its research domain. The conference is also something of an anniversary, since the second conference of the working group was held nearby 10 years ago. I have some reflections on the formation and early conferences of the working group, the comparative advantage of being sponsored by IFIP and TC8, the reasons for WG 8.6, and the...

In today's rapidly changing global work environment, all workers directly experience increased organizational complexity. Companies are functionally distributed, many across the globe. Intense competition for markets and margins makes adaptiveness and innovation imperative. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are pervasive and fundamental infrastructures, their use deeply integrated into work processes. Workers collaborate electronically with co-workers they may never meet face-to-face or with employees of other companies. New boundaries of time, space, business unit, culture,...

This volume contains the proceedings of the IFIPTM 2007, the Joint iTrust and PST Conferences on Privacy, Trust Management and Security, held in Mo- ton, New Brunswick, Canada from July 29th to August 2nd, 2007. The annual iTrust international conference looks at trust from multidis- plinary perspectives: economic, legal, psychology, philosophy, sociology as well as information technology, is built on the work of the iTrust working group (http: //www.itrust.uoc.gr), and has had four highly successful conferences in Europe to date. The annual PST conference has quickly established itself as a...

This volume presents the proceedings of the IFIP TC2 WG 2.5 Conference on Grid-Based Problem Solving Environments: Implications for Development and Deployment of Numerical Software, held in Prescott, Arizona from July 17-21, 2006. The book contains the most up-to-date research on grid-based computing. It will interest users and developers of both grid-based and traditional problem solving environments, developers of grid infrastructure, and developers of numerical software.

This book contains extended and revised versions of the best papers that were presented during the thirteenth edition of the IFIP TC10/WG10.5 International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, a Global System-on-a-Chip Design & CAD conference. The 13th conference was held at the Parmelia Hilton Hotel, Perth, Western Australia (October 17-19, 2005). Previous conferences have taken place in Edinburgh, Trondheim, Vancouver, Munich, Grenoble, Tokyo, Gramado, Lisbon, Montpellier and Darmstadt. The purpose of this conference, sponsored by IFIP TC 10 Working Group 10.5, is to provide a forum...

This proceedings volume contains the papers of the scientific program of the IFIP Working Group 8.I working conference on Situational Method Engineering: Fundamentals and Experiences. The conference has been held from 12 to 14 September 2007 at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Since the early 1980s, the IFIP WG8.1 working conferences have provided a forum for the presentation and exchange ofresearch results and practical experiences within the field of information systems development methods. After two successful Method Engineering conferences in Atlanta in 1996 and in Kanazawa in...

The competitive environment is becoming increasingly more complex and intense. In order to cope, business decisions related to various areas tend to become more interrelated. Firms need to couple their operations strategies to the marketing strategies to best support the competition of their products in the marketplace. The perspectives on production management systems are getting more strategic. A more integrated approach is thus called for, bringing together the various perspectives on production management systems and operations strategy. This relationship is important in any type of...

The international conference Personal Wireless Communications (PWC 2007) was the twelfth conference of its series aimed at stimulating technical exchange between researchers, practitioners and students interested in mobile computing and wireless networks. On behalf of the International Advisory Committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2007 event. Wireless communication faces dramatic changes. The wireless networks are expanding rapidly in subscribers, capability, coverage, and applications, and costs continue to decrease. Mobile devices are becoming...