Erica Mourão

Municipal ombudsman offices face challenges in managing increasing citizen demands and stimulating meaningful participation, despite legal frameworks guaranteeing citizen rights. Crowdsourcing presents a potential avenue to improve the efficiency of the Ombudsman office and the engagement of citizens. This systematic literature review (SLR) investigates the application of crowdsourcing in municipal ombudsman offices, synthesizing existing research to identify best practices, challenges, and research gaps. A comprehensive search of academic databases from 2010 to 2023 initially yielded 1590 papers. Following a rigorous five-stage filtering process, 24 relevant studies were selected for in-depth analysis. The findings reveal a growing trend of utilizing crowdsourcing primarily for feedback collection and complaint management, although its application in direct decision-making processes within ombudsman offices remains limited. While the literature reports benefits such as increased efficiency and faster problem resolution, significant challenges persist. These include digital inequality, which can exclude vulnerable populations; concerns about the credibility of citizen-submitted data; and institutional resistance to adopting new, crowdsourced approaches. This review indicates the need for further research into the long-term impacts of crowdsourcing on citizen empowerment and ombudsman office accountability. The study provides a valuable foundation for researchers and practitioners seeking to leverage crowdsourcing to strengthen municipal ombudsman services and promote citizen participation, emphasizing the importance of addressing these identified challenges to realize the full potential of crowdsourcing in this context.

Modern research strongly depends on software that is essential in various domains, including engineering, sciences, and other fields, and most often developed within universities and used by the researchers themselves. This software, specifically referred to as research software, presents a unique set of challenges and constraints in its life cycle, methodology, practices, disclosure, and incentives, thereby distinguishing it from conventional software. However, while certain research software developed and used in universities have achieved widespread use and been adopted by the academic community, thereby considered “successful”, others have failed to secure the same level of adoption, resulting in non-adoption and abandonment software leading to an unnecessary expenditure of development time and resources. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing the adoption can assist in mitigating these issues. In this context, the primary aim of this study is to investigate factors influencing the adoption of research software by users and developers, to discern their relative importance, and to explore the challenges associated with fostering the adoption of such software. A survey involving 173 Brazilian academic researchers was executed to gather insights regarding the significance of the factors contributing to the adoption of research software and the obstacles encountered in its adoption. The collected data underwent rigorous statistical analysis, utilizing Independent Sample T-test and Factor Analysis to thoroughly examine the information and provide a ranking of factors. The survey responses were used to rank factors contributing to the adoption of research software, with results stratified by respondents’ profiles. This study suggests that academic researchers can optimize their use of research software by recognizing and prioritizing adoption factors, preventing non-adoption, and overcoming the identified challenges. Understanding the relative importance of each factor can enhance support for research software developers and users and, consequently, promote the broader adoption of research software.

Context: Before starting the development of a final thesis, there areseveral challenges for both faculty advisors and university students.For professors, notoriously, there is the great challenge of findingstudents who want to participate in the development of their academicprojects. For students, the difficulty of finding projects orteachers who want to work on their ideas is recurrent. Objective:The goal of this work is to propose and evaluate a tool called Plugue,to support the project-based learning approach and manage topicideas projects in the academic community. Method: A survey with82 Brazilian academic students and professors was conducted tocollect information about the perception of the utility, perceptionof use, and intention to use the tool using the TAM3 model. Ananalysis of the collected data was conducted according to exploredata and generate results. Results: We identified the characteristicsof participants, current scenario, and perceptions of utility, use, andintended use according to the level of agreement of participants.Conclusions: Our study indicates that the approaches used and thefeatures of the Plugue tool are promising and suitable for highereducation and confirm the need for the tool for universities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted from traditional face-to-face teaching to technology-mediated distance learning, creating significant new challenges for teachers and students. The rapid integration of new technologies into the teaching and learning process can give rise to privacy issues. This study investigates how teachers and students of undergraduate and graduate courses in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have been educated about protecting their privacy during online course activities. An exploratory qualitative-quantitative study was conducted, and 91 participants were interviewed to determine how they were guided to protect their privacy during online course activities. The study found that 75% of teachers consider teaching about privacy in ICT courses to be “very important”. However, these teachers still lack guidance, as 66% have not communicated privacy-related rights to their students. Furthermore, 80% have yet to communicate about websites or the location of privacy information from the educational institution. Despite some positive results identified in the study, such as 93% of teachers reporting that they are recording activities and 91% of students stating that they were informed about the recording of activities, challenges still need to be addressed regarding privacy issues during online teaching and learning activities. Therefore, the study proposes some good privacy practices that can be adopted by educational institutions, teachers, and students in the context of technology-mediated education.