Welcome

The National Center for Digital Government (NCDG) seeks to build global research capacity, to advance practice, and to strengthen the network of researchers and practitioners engaged in building and using technology in government.

Visit our Research pages for more information on our recent presentations and publications and our People pages for more information about our staff, fellows, and researchers.

News The National Center for Digital Government is pleased to announce its 2010-2011 Student Research Grants (SRG). University of Massachusetts Amherst undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to apply. Download an application here.   Charlie Schweik presented at FOSS2010: Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software in February. Schweik's research focuses on open source software as commons. Read his NCDG working papers on the subject. Jane Fountain was part of a panel presentation on “Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government” at the Dubai School of Government. The panel coincided with an Arabic release of a book with the same name. [more] Slides from the February 2010 AAAS workshop "National Science Foudnation and Ethics in Science and Engineering" are now available through the ESENCe website. [more] Video from Jane Fountain's February 2010 lecture, "Government 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges," is now available here. The lecture was organized by the Escuola de Organization Industriel in Madrid. An interview with Dr. Fountain is also available here [in Spanish]. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has published Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. "Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget." Visit Mayer-Schonberger's website for a list of cities where he will be presenting this work. NCDG 2008-2009 Fellow, R. Erdem Erkul has been elected as a Representative of the Turkish Informatics Association in the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS ) in Brussels. See CEPIS for more information. NCDG undergraduate Fellow, Conor White-Sullivan is featured in the Daily Hampshire Gazette as one of the founders of localocracy.org, which is set to launch next month. See "Localocracy.com aims to drive grassroots politics in Amherst" (log in may be required) more news

Open Government: Transparency, Participation, & Collaboration Video from the October 30, 2009 NCDG lecture with Beth Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, is available here. Recent Publications by NCDG Affiliates Seok-Jin Eom. 2010. "The Institutional Dimension of e-Government Promotion: A Comparative Study on Making ‘Business Reference Model (BRM)’ in the U.S. and Korea." NCDG Working Paper #10-001. Charles M. Schweik. 2009. The Open Source Software Ecosystem. NCDG Working Paper #09-002. Matthew Hindman. 2008. The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton University Press.   Enrico Ferro, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, & Michael D. Williams, Eds. 2009. Handbook of Research on Overcoming Digital Divides: Constructing an Equitable and Competitive Information Society. IGI Global. Lazer, D. et al. 2009. Computational Social Science. Science, 323(5915), 721-723.   Hamel, M.P. & Schweik, C. 2009. Open Source Collaboration: Two Cases in the US Public Sector. First Monday, 14(1). Online. Luna Reyes, L. and Gil-Garcia, J. R. 2008. E-Government and Inter-Organizational Collaboration in Mexico: Survey Results [PDF]. NCDG Working Paper #08-003. more publications

Current Projects Networked Governance:
Jane Fountain, NCDG Director, is investigating the structural, behavioral, and political antecedents of sustainable cross-agency relationships in the federal government. She is examining the implications of these relationships for state structure and the policymaking process. See one of her latest working papers and the Building Cross Agency Initiatives page for more information on the topic.

Collaboration in Free and Open Source Software and Open Content:
Charles Schweik, NCDG Associate Director, is currently conducting research around open source programming and open content projects as "commons" and as new paradigms for the production of scientific research. More information about his research is available here.

eRulemaking and Democracy:
Stuart Shulman, NCDG Associate Director, has been PI on National Science Foundation-funded research projects focusing on electronic rulemaking, human language technologies, coding across the disciplines, digital citizenship, and service-learning efforts in the United States. For more information on Dr. Shulman's research, see his web site. For more information on his e-rulemaking research click here.

Ethics in Science and Engineering:
Jane Fountain, NCDG Director, and Marilyn Billings, Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst are developing a beta site to test cybertools and cyberinfrastructure for an interdisciplinary, multimedia, and international online beta repository to support ethics in science and engineering. Visit the Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse (ESENCe) Beta Site here. Fountain, MJ Peterson, and several other faculty at UMass Amherst are also developing modules and frameworks to introduce international dimensions of ethics into S&E courses. For more information on this project, visit the International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering Project page.

For more NCDG projects, please visit our Research section.