Browsing by Subject "Decentralization"

Online Social Network (OSN) services such as Facebook and Google+ are fun and useful. Hundreds of millions of users rely on these services and third-party applications to process and share personal data such as friends lists, photos, and geographic location histories. The primary drawback of today's popular OSNs is that users must fully trust a centralized service provider to properly handle their data.

This dissertation explores the feasibility of building feature-rich, privacy-preserving OSNs by shifting the bases for trust away from centralized service providers and third-party application developers and toward infrastructure providers and OSN users themselves.

We propose limiting the trust users place in service providers through two decentralized OSNs: Vis-a-Vis and Confidant. In Vis-a-Vis, privacy-sensitive data is only accessed by user-controlled code executing on ``infrastructure as a service" platforms such as EC2. In Confidant this data may only be accessed by code running on desktop PCs controlled by a user's close friends. To reduce

the risks posed by third-party OSN applications, we also developed a Multi-User Taint Tracker (MUTT). MUTT is a secure ``platform as a service" that ensures that third-party applications adhere to access policies defined by service providers and users.

Vis-a-Vis is a decentralized framework for location-based OSN services based on the

privacy-preserving notion of a Virtual Individual Server (VIS). A VIS is a personal virtual machine running within a paid compute utility. In Vis-a-Vis, a person stores her data on her own VIS, which arbitrates access to that data by others. VISs self-organize into overlay networks corresponding to social groups with whom their owners wish to share location information. Vis-a-Vis uses distributed location trees to provide efficient and scalable operations for creating, joining, leaving, searching, and publishing location data to these groups.

Confidant is a decentralized OSN platform designed to support a scalable application framework for OSN data without compromising users' privacy. Confidant replicates a user's data on servers controlled by her friends. Because data is stored on trusted servers, Confidant allows application code to run directly on these storage servers. To manage access-control policies under weakly-consistent replication, Confidant eliminates write conflicts through a lightweight cloud-based state manager and through a simple mechanism for updating the bindings between access policies and replicated data.

For securing risks from third-party OSN applications, this thesis proposes a Multi-User Taint Tracker (MUTT) -- a secure ``platform as a service'' designed to ensure that third-party applications adhere to access policies defined by service providers and users. Mutt's design is informed by a careful analysis of 170 Facebook apps, which allows us to characterize the requirements and risks posed by several classes of apps. Our MUTT prototype has been integrated into the AppScale cloud system, and experiments show that the additional data-confidentiality guarantees of running an app on MUTT come at a reasonable performance cost.

A review of current policy and literature revealed that decentralization and community forestry policies in Indonesia have progressed in terms of granting local governments a greater share of resource revenues and in acknowledging the concept of community participation in resource management. However, the central government has failed to devolve the majority of authority over state lands, which compose the vast majority of Indonesia’s forest resources. Additionally, policies still lack provisions for secure access to and control of resources by local communities. As such, the national community forestry policy cannot truly be labeled a “community-based” program, and must still undergo significant reform in order to successfully integrate with existing, locally-based CBFM programs.

"Capacity-building organizations” help to improve the necessary capacities required by communities to successfully implement CBFM projects. I identified 97 organizations operating in Kalimantan, finding the greatest concentration in the province of West Kalimantan. The most common organizational focus was ‘sustainable development and resource management’ and the most widely practiced activities were advocacy, research, and training – with variations occurring between operational scales. I found a dramatic increase in organization establishment during the last decade, particularly in Kalimantan-based organizations and peaking during years coinciding with initial decentralization reforms. Based on my analysis, I concluded that future efforts by organizations should concentrate on increasing representation in the provinces of East and South Kalimantan, as well as in individual districts across all four provinces; on making the issue of conservation a central focus for a greater number of organizations; and on improving interorganizational communication.

This dissertation examines the political determinants of government spending across different levels of education. What are the political motivations that drive budgetary decisions on primary, secondary, and tertiary education? Who are the beneficiaries of these appropriations? Why are they capable of influencing the decisions over appropriations?

I argue that the distribution of education spending across education levels depends on the capacity of organized groups active in this sector to make their demands heard and served by governments. Better organized groups have stronger capacity to take advantage of the electoral concerns of politicians and influence their decisions on educational budgets. I provide evidence to show that, with some exceptions, the teachers' unions in the primary and secondary schools are the most influential organized group in the education sector. By taking their demands out to the streets, by capturing key positions in the education ministries, and by using their mobilization capacity in the electoral arena, teachers have made governments cater to their economic interests, rather than direct resources in ways that would enhance access to and the quality of education.

I test the theoretical arguments using an original dataset incorporating a comprehensive account of all protests, strikes, and other disruptive actions by teachers, university workers, students, and parents in Mexico between 1992 and 2008. The statistical analysis reveals that 1) states with higher levels of teachers' protests receive larger federal education grants, and that 2) subnational authorities spend more on primary and lower secondary as a consequence of the larger disruptive behavior observed in these education levels. Complementary qualitative evidence shows how the teachers' union has captured the education ministries at the federal and the subnational levels, consolidating its influence over education policy. Finally, this study reveals the teachers' union capacity to leverage their participation in electoral politics in order to defend its economic interests.

Today, the trend towards decentralization is far-reaching. Proponents of decentralization have argued that decentralization promotes responsive and accountable local government by shortening the distance between local representatives and their constituency. However, in this paper, I focus on the countervailing effect of decentralization on the accountability mechanism, arguing that decentralization, which increases the number of actors eligible for policy making and implementation in governance as a whole, may blur lines of responsibility, thus weakening citizens’ ability to sanction government in election. By using the ordinary least squares (OLS) interaction model based on historical panel data for 78 countries in the 2002 – 2010 period, I test the hypothesis that as the number of government tiers increases, there will be a negative interaction between the number of government tiers and decentralization policies. The regression results show empirical evidence that decentralization policies, having a positive impact on governance under a relatively simple form of multilevel governance, have no more statistically significant effects as the complexity of government structure exceeds a certain degree. In particular, this paper found that the presence of intergovernmental meeting with legally binding authority have a negative impact on governance when the complexity of government structure reaches to the highest level.