Government-incentivized crowdfunding for one-belt, one-road enterprises: design and research issues

Background:Local,state,and federal governments have started exploring the potential of crowdfunding in transforming conventional financing methods used previously to fund public projects and services.While crowdfunding has been applied to improve government financing methods in recent years,little is known about how this new model can be extended and applied in international collaboration among governmentincentivized projects.Methods:In this paper,we explores what roles crowdfunding can play as a financial intermediary to support government-incentivized multinational projects in the context of the One-Belt,One-Road initiative.Results:We conjecture that crowdfunding can offer an efficient mechanism to improve participatory budgeting and facilitate private-public collaboration while providing a high level of transparency in the budget decision process.Conclusions:The paper also discusses research issues and challenges,including features of the crowdfunding platforms that can affect the adoption and use of the crowdfunding platforms in multinational initiatives.

Detecting incentivized review groups with co-review graph

Online reviews play a crucial role in the ecosystem of nowadays business(especially e-commerce platforms),and have become the primary source of consumer opinions.To manipulate consumers’opinions,some sellers of e-commerce platforms outsource opinion spamming with incentives(e.g.,free products)in exchange for incen-tivized reviews.As incentives,by nature,are likely to drive more biased reviews or even fake reviews.Despite e-commerce platforms such as Amazon have taken initiatives to squash the incentivized review practice,sellers turn to various social networking platforms(e.g.,Facebook)to outsource the incentivized reviews.The aggre-gation of sellers who request incentivized reviews and reviewers who seek incentives forms incentivized review groups.In this paper,we focus on the incentivized review groups in e-commerce platforms.We perform the data collections from various social networking platforms,including Facebook,WeChat,and Douban.A measurement study of incentivized review groups is conducted with regards to group members,group activities,and products.To identify the incentivized review groups,we propose a new detection approach based on co-review graphs.Specifically,we employ the community detection method to find the suspicious communities from co-review graphs.We also build a“gold standard”dataset from the data we collected,which contains the information of reviewers who belong to incentivized review groups.We utilize the“gold standard”dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our detection approach.

Local Community Participation in Rhino Conservation-Key to Conservation Success

A robust framework to guide community engagement in sustainable wildlife conservation and illegal wildlife trade is lacking.Virtually all conservation bodies and players believe that local communities are key to the success of rhino conservation but they are not equally walking their talk.Bottom-up community-based initiatives help to curb poaching especially level one poachers.The multifaceted problem of the African rhinoceros poaching on the continent is approaching calamitous proportions,with astounding,sobering statistics revealing the sheer extent of the illegal practice today.Poverty,greediness,superstition,rampant corruption,unchecked social injustice,ruthlessness,and ignorance are fuelling the interplay of rhino horn demand and supply.In order to save the remaining rhinoceros species there is need for economic transformation which will benefit both the communities and wildlife.Communities should get direct financial benefits from rhinoceros conservation,capacitate them and always engage them in rhinoceros conservation matters.Rhino protection should be incentivized,increasing the number of local people benefiting from conservation,and decreasing hostility towards wildlife will motivate local people to fully embrace conservation efforts.These conservation efforts should first target level one poachers who are vulnerable and exposed,by developing a comprehensive profitable and lucrative community participation packages in all rhino properties.Conservationists should walk their talk and genuinely work with local communities to build support for rhino conservation through education,awareness,self-sustaining business ventures and employment.

Incentives for the Quality and Safety Traceability System of Agricultural Products

The quality and safety traceability system of agricultural products is an important measure to protect the quality and safety of agricultural products. Farmers and food enterprises are main operators of the traceability system. If they are effectively encouraged to practice traceability system,food safety can be guaranteed from the source. This paper studies the incentive problem of agricultural product traceability system from two aspects- vertical contract coordination and government external incentive.

Community Monitoring of Forest Carbon Stocks and Safeguards Tracking in Kenya: Design and Implementation Considerations

This paper investigates modalities required to design and implement community monitoring of forest carbon stock changes and safeguards implementation in Kenya. General principles and elements were drawn from the UNFCCC REDD+ policy frameworks for developing modalities and procedures for designing community forest monitoring system. The paper utilised policy analysis approach used to derive monitoring goals and objectives by assessing the compatibility of Kenya’s policy and legislative framework with monitoring elements provided in the UNFCCC REDD+ policy mechanism. The elements included monitoring goals, objectives, questions, indicators, and methods and tools. Two goals were identified which included, reduction of forest carbon emissions (ER) and monitoring of multiple social and environmental safeguards (SG). Five ER related objectives were identified to include: forest reference emission levels or forest reference levels, drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, Land use activities, eligible ER actions and estimation of forest emissions. Six objectives guiding SG were identified to include: policy, governance, human rights, socio-economic, biodiversity and environmental concerns. Corresponding questions to the goals and objectives were systematically designed. In turns, indicators, depicting quantitative and qualitative measurements, which best provided answers to questions were identified. The various methods and tools used by communities around the world in providing data and information required to satisfy the indictors were identified through literature review. The review identified four methods and tools that included: Remote Sensing and GIS, GPS survey, smartphone survey and Ground trothing. Smartphone and cloud-based server technology were found to be the recent emergent tools in aiding community monitoring of REDD+ projects. The paper argues that local communities and indigenous peoples have the capability and capacity to monitor and undertake forest carbon monitoring and tracking of implementation of safeguards if supported with relevant training;compensated for the time, labour and knowledge they contribute to the process;provided with feedback and involved decision making process.

Blockchain-based prosumer incentivization for peak mitigation through temporal aggregation and contextual clustering

Peak mitigation is of interest to power companies as peak periods may require the operator to over provision supply in order to meet the peak demand.Flattening the usage curve can result in cost savings,both for the power companies and the end users.Integration of renewable energy into the energy infrastructure presents an opportunity to use excess renewable generation to supplement supply and alleviate peaks.In addition,demand side management can shift the usage from peak to off-peak times and reduce the magnitude of peaks.In this work,we present a data driven approach for incentive-based peak mitigation.Understanding user energy profiles is an essential step in this process.We begin by analysing a popular energy research dataset published by the Ausgrid corporation.Extracting aggregated user energy behavior in temporal contexts and semantic linking and contextual clustering give us insight into consumption and rooftop solar generation patterns.We implement,and performance test a blockchain-based prosumer incentivization system.The smart contract logic is based on our analysis of the Ausgrid dataset.Our implementation is capable of supporting 792,540 customers with a reasonably low infrastructure footprint.

Research-A blockchainofknowledge?

This perspective proposes that,by virtue of its sophisticated trust and consensus finding mechanisms,blockchain has the clear potential to substantially upgrade the processes and organization traditionally underpinning academic science and commercial technology development comprising funding,project delivery,generation of intellectual property,documentation and publication.For supporting this hypothesis,striking analogies between the concepts underlying blockchain technology with research are identified,and applied to the generation of verified knowledge in science and technology development.It is then elaborated how a blockchain-enabled token economy can efficiently and transparently incentivize and coordinate an integrative and community-inclusive participatory approach to fuel crowdsourcing of collective intelligence for contributing ideas,work,infrastructure,funding,data,validation,management,assessment,governance,arbitration and exploitation of projects.Quality,credibility and direction of projects are optimized by demanding collateral“skin-in-the-game”from contributors based on blockchain-enabled staking,reputation systems and prediction markets.This way research progress emerges as a chain of community generated and independently vetted blocks of scientific knowledge;these new blocks are concatenated with the state-of-the-art according to transparent consensus mechanisms.