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There has been a long-running debate as to which is more important in the job market, education or experience. Traditionally, people have looked at these as exclusive traits of one another; however, more progressive thought sees these as complimentary attributes in perspective and existing employees that can be achieved at the same time through proactive activities such as micro-credentialing. This chapter will explore how formal and informal micro-credentialing processes can be put forward in both education and training environments.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, 2022) shows an increase in severity and frequency of natural disasters in the past years with more organisations being faced with surviving these events than ever before. The recent COVID pandemic has shown how every organisation across the globe can be affected by a disaster and the cascading effects that follow. Techniques such as micro-credentialing is a tool that can be utilised by all organisations to ensure a safer outcome from these events as well as being positioned for better continuity of critical operations through the event helping to increase the survivability and profitability of the affected organisation.

The use of micro-credentialing components successfully could be discussed using any field or discipline. To be applicable to all readers, this chapter primarily focusses on the emergency services/management discipline as an example programme of how micro-credentialing can be efficiently utilised to produce a more successful workforce. Emergency management (EM) truly is an interdisciplinary field that utilises many other fields to protect people, organisations, and communities from emergencies and disasters. More importantly, though, there are components of EM that every field should embrace for safety as well as to ensure continuity of operations through any event, thereby making the components in this chapter applicable to all readers regardless of discipline or organisation.

Due to the impact of the pandemic that enforced mass closures and lock downs, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] institutions around the world were required to re-think how they interacted with the public. As a result of the measures that enforced isolation, distancing, and increased hygiene requirements, the usefulness of virtual technologies as a storytelling medium has come into sharper focus. This chapter will explore the emergence of augmented reality as a viable post-COVID-19 solution to meaningful digital narrative creation and user interaction in the museum environment. This chapter will concentrate on the development of a project between the University of South Australia [UniSA] and the South Australian Museum [SAM] to explore how it might be possible to create sustainable immersive stories within this environment.

We investigate how firing notification procedures influence wage growth. Using a sample of 33 countries over the period 2006–2015, we show that administrative requirements in cases of dismissal have a positive and significant effect on wage growth. The result is robust even after controlling for the endogeneity of the firing notification restrictions, the involvement of third parties in the wage bargaining process, the minimum wage, the firms' training policy, and the composition of employment. These findings suggest that firing notification procedures foster the growth of wages by increasing the bargaining power of incumbent workers.

In this chapter, Jared Thomas, a Nukunu person from the Southern Flinders Ranges and a Research Fellow at the South Australian Museum and University of South Australia, reflects on his efforts to enhance the Fire Exhibit within the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery [AACG], which has not been updated in 20 years. Thomas draws from an international precedent of involving Indigenous communities in museum displays.

The author outlines the limitations of renovations in terms of budget, space, and Indigenous protocols, while considering the potential impact of the proposed Tarrkarri Centre for First Nations Culture. He emphasises the importance of fostering relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples, allowing Indigenous voices to speak for themselves.

Thomas focusses on the Fire Exhibit, discussing its significance in Aboriginal culture, the lack of contextualisation, and the need for improved representation. He proposes short-term actions such as adding QR-code-based text for context, and long-term ambitions like incorporating audio-visual and augmented reality elements. He highlights the importance of Aboriginal fire land management practices, especially in the aftermath of the 2019 Australian bushfires.

Thomas proposes strengthening the exhibit’s connection to foods, medicines, and fixatives that benefit from cultural burning. He envisions collaboration with the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and acknowledges the resource constraints faced by the museum. He concludes by envisioning a template for extending improvements across the museum and fostering better understanding and representation of Aboriginal culture.

Country and cultural heritage are inextricably linked for First Nations peoples. This chapter explores those relationships in the context of repatriating cultural heritage materials back to Country and conceptualising a place for its ‘awakening’ for the Ngadjuri community of Mid-North South Australia. These materials in the context of this book ‘interpreted’ as a form of data curation, requiring potentially unique information systems designs to achieve accessibility, recoverability, and durability in remote communities with limited internet and mobile phone coverage. On the other hand, it is critically important to note, that the processes, challenges and repatriation of culturally sensitive materials and remains, are dependant here on the limitations of language. The reference to the notion of ‘data’ as a descriptor, and an inadequate term on some level, does not, and is not intended to, diminish any of their cultural significance and gravity. These are challenges that are worth the intellectual and technological investment to realise a return to Country for generationally displaced peoples and their cultural property that also needs to make it home.

This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and an examination of communication failures during the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. This chapter theorizes that regulatory decisions construct social and disaster vulnerability. Rooted in the Whole Community approach to disaster planning and relief espoused by the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this chapter calls for leadership to end the digital divide. It highlights the imperative of understanding community information needs and argues for linking strategies to close the digital divide with infrastructure and emergency planning. As the Internet’s integration into society increases, the digital divide diminishes access to societal resources including disaster aid, and exacerbates wildfire, flood, pandemic, and other risks. To mitigate climate change, climate-induced disaster, protect access to social services and the economy, and safeguard democracy, it argues for digital inclusion strategies as a centerpiece of community-centered infrastructure regulation and disaster relief.

In the mid-2000s, the operator of New York City’s mass transit network committed more than a half-billion dollars to military contractor Lockheed Martin for a security technology capable, in part, of inferring threats based on analysis of data streams, of developing response strategies, and taking automated action toward alerts and calamities in light of evolving circumstances. The project was a failure. This chapter explores the conceptualization and development of this technology – rooted in cybernetics – and compares its conceptual underpinnings with some situated problems of awareness, communication, coordination, and action in emergencies as they unfold in one of the busiest transport systems in the world, the New York subway. The author shows how the technology, with all the theatrical trappings of a “legitimate” security solution, was apparently conceived without a grounded understanding of actual use-cases, and the degree to which the complex interactions which give rise to subway emergency can be anticipated in – and therefore managed through – a technological system. As a case-study, the chapter illustrates the pitfalls of deploying technology against problems which are not well-defined in the first place, to the neglect of investments against much more fundamental problems – such as inadequate communication systems, and unstable relationships with emergency response agencies – which might offer guaranteed benefits, and indeed lay a firm groundwork for future deployment of more ambitious technology.

The world needs more Eastern knowledge and, ergo, more consciousness. Humanity will unlikely experience a quantum leap in consciousness if we keep ignoring Eastern and other sources of perennial wisdom in the design and development of our socioeconomic and ecological systems. This chapter aims to bridge the consciousness gap by exploring the meaning and application of Buddhist and Taoist systems thinking to regenerative systemic leadership, design, development and sustainable transformation.