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.
Charlie Schweik, Associate Director of NCDG, is the lead author ofInternet Success: A Study of Open Source Commonsforthcoming in May and published by MIT Press. The book is the product of the first large-scale empirical study to look at social, technical, and institutional aspects of open-source software (OSS)--readable software source code that can be copied, modified, and distributed freely. Schweik and his co-author Robert English examine factors that lead to success in OSS projects and work toward a better understanding of Internet-based collaboration. Drawing on literature from many disciplines and using a theoretical framework developed for the study of environmental commons, Schweik and English examine stages of OSS development, presenting multivariate statistical models of success and abandonment. Schweik and English argue that analyzing the conditions of OSS successes may also inform Internet collaborations in fields beyond software engineering, particularly those that aim to solve complex technical, social, and political problems.
Maxat Kassan, from Eurasian National University, gave a talk on December 6 entitled, "Development of e-Government in Kazakhstan: Case Study of a Transitional Country."
Maxat Kassen is an Associate Professor at the Eurasian National University in Astana, Kazakhstan, School of Journalism and Political Science, Department of Television and Public Relations. He has several scientific publications on digital media policy development published in Kazakhstan, USA and Russia. His research interest is about applying successful e-government projects and development of digital democracy via use of modern media technologies. He has participated as a consultant in realization of the national e-government consultancy service. Also, he worked in the National News Agency Kazinform as a head of foreign media service. He received his C.Sc./PhD degree in Political Science from the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Kazakhstan in 2008.
Jane Fountain, Director of NCDG, gave the keynote address on November 18th, 2011, at GovCamp Singapore. The unconference assembled leading thinkers from government, academia, industry and citizen organizations to share ideas about how to improve citizen engagement and government services in Singapore through technology. The international GovCamp model applies a government context to evolving Web 2.0 technologies. GovCamp rests on three central pillars: transparency; collaboration; and participation in government. Follow the dialogue here.
NCDG engaged in a virtual conference with researchers and leaders at Centro de Estudos Internacionais sobre Governo (CEGOV) on November 21. CEGOV researchers work on multidisciplinary projects in the areas of international politics and governance, monitoring and evaluating public policies, institutional development and the capacity for governance in Brazilian and South American models as well as comparing institutional decision-making in management, decentralization and democratic control of public service. Diego Canabarro, a lawyer and specialist in international relations, visited NCDG during November to meet with researchers on a variety of Internet policy challenges facing Brazil and the Global South.
Erdem Erkul, a former NCDG Fellow, and lead for Citizen Engagement for Microsoft Turkey, was a key organizer of the 40th Anniversary Conference of the Informatics Association of Turkey. The conference drew hundreds of researchers, activists, government officials and business leaders from throughout Turkey. Jane Fountain gave the international keynote address focusing on the potential and challenges for social activism in the digital age.
Digital governance is one of the five key themes for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos this year. In Abu Dhabi, interest in digital governance from several Global Agenda Councils was intense. This year, Jane Fountain is the Vice Chair of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. She chaired this Council last year and, with Council members, launched the report, "The Future of Government: Lessons Learned from around the World" at the Europe and Central Asia Summit held in Vienna.
Conor White-Sullivan, NCDG undergraduate fellow 2009-2010, co-founded Localocracy in 2008 to engage citizens, elected officials and journalists in local issues on a transparent and public platform. Wanting to build on their approach to enhancing democracy online, AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group purchased Localocracy on October 3rd. Along with two of his co-founders, Conor White-Sullivan, 23, will join Huffington Post Media Group and continue to expand their work. Read More in The Boston Globe, Mass High Tech, and Bloomberg.
To kick off Open Access Week (October 24-28),a series of events about open educational resources, open access journals, open data, copyrights and authors rights, keynote speaker Patricia Aufderheidegave a talk, Beyond the Copyright Wars: Fair Use, Free Speech, and Reframing the Policy Debate, on Monday October 24.
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.
Crowdsourcing and the Environment: Charles Schweik, NCDG Associate Director, and colleagues at UMass Amherst are creating the Mobile Gulf Observatory, an iPhone application that creates "citizen scientists" and uses crowdsourcing technologies to help locate and rescue injuried and oiled wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico.
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.
Acknowledgment and Disclaimer - This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers 0131923 and 0630239. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
National Center for Digital Government
