The research in this dissertation explores the social significance of local memory websites. Local memory websites offer local residents a platform where they collect and share memories about particular places or experiences in their neighbourhoods and districts. Following a systematic review and a broad field study, a narrative approach is developed to study collective levels of empowerment within the ‘Memory of East’ and the ‘Memory of West’, both in Amsterdam. Two empirical questions steer a double case study: 1) ‘How does the organizational development influence the online dynamics?’ and 2) ‘What collective empowerment do the online dynamics express?’ With its stronger social capital, the Memory of East is more likely to resist official memory intuitions, commercial popular culture and local politics than the Memory of West. On the other hand, with its more inclusive character, the Memory of West is more representative for the broad cultural backgrounds of its inhabitants than the Memory of East. These findings are shown to be related to five organizational continuums on which both websites are plotted to indicate their crucial organizational differences. Apart from a claim about the theoretical value of this model, it is illustrated how it functions as a discursive tool for the core groups behind both websites.
MULTIFILE
Many organizations have undergone substantial reorganization in the last decade. They re-engineered their business processes and exchanged proprietary, not integrated applications for more standard solutions. Integration of structured data in relational databases has improved documentation of business transactions and increased data quality. But almost 90% of the information that organizations manage is unstructured, cannot easily be integrated into a traditional database. When used for organizational actions and transactions, structured and unstructured information are records. They are meant and used as evidence. Governments, courts and other stakeholders are making increasing demands for the trustworthiness of records. An analysis of literature of the information, organization and archival sciences illustrates that accountability needs the reconstruction of the past. Hypothesis of this paper is that for the reconstruction of the past each organization needs a combination of threemechanisms: enterprise records management, organizational memory and records auditing. Enterprise records management ensures that records meet the quality requirements needed for accountability: integrity, authenticity, controllability and historicity. They ensure records that can be trusted and enhance the possibilities for the reconstruction of the past. The organizational memory ensures that trusted records are preserved for as long as is necessary to comply with accountability regulations. It provides an ICT infrastructure to (indefinitely) store those records and to keep them accessible. Records auditing researches the first two mentioned mechanisms to assess the possibility to reconstruct past organizational actions and transactions. These mechanisms ensure that organizations have a documented understanding of [1] the processing of actions and transactions within business processes; [2] the dissemination of trusted records; [3] the way the organization accounts for the actions and transactions within its business processes; and [4] the reconstruction of actions and transactions from business processes over time. This understanding is crucial for the reconstruction of the past and for organizational accountability.
MULTIFILE
In this article, we explain how we envision the further interconnection of existing initiatives of online local memory collecting into a new social infrastructure, that is beneficial to the whole of Amsterdam. Three examples of local memory websites show how large districts in the East, South and West are represented thoroughly by local residents, in spite of differences in organizational characteristics. The concept of empowerment, as a multilevel construct, lends itself to frame these examples as important building blocks of socially sustainable districts and neighborhoods. Local knowledge, experiences and people become connected across Amsterdam when local memory websites become interconnected, by introducing city-wide compelling themes. Discussing this social infrastructure in relation to the concept of smart cities, leads us to a plea for more research focus on sociably smart cities.
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