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NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM NCDG

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News in 2008:

  • July 22, 2008: NCDG is pleased to welcome Dr. Stuart Shulman to the Center as Associate Director. As of September 1, 2008, Dr. Shulman will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He remains a Senior Research Associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) and in the Université de Genève-, European University Institute-, and Oxford Internet Institute-based E-Democracy Centre.  

    Dr. Shulman was the founder and Director of UCSUR’s Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) from 2005-2008 and is currently Director of QDAP-UMass. He is also the sole inventor of the Coding Analysis Toolkit. QDAP & QDAP-UMass are fee-for-service coding labs that work on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), and other U.S. funding agencies. 

    As Director of the NSF-funded eRulemakning Research Group, Dr. Shulman was the organizer and chair for federal agency-level electronic rulemaking workshops funded by the NSF and held at the Council for Excellence in Government (2001), the National Defense University (2002), the National Science Foundation (2003 & 2006), and The George Washington University (2004). In November of 2006, he chaired a NSF-funded workshop at Pitt titled "Coding across the Disciplines," which brought social and computer scientists together to discuss annotation science.

    For five years, Dr. Shulman has served on the Program Committee for the NSF’s National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o).  He was the dg.o 2006 Workshop and Tutorial Chair and also the Chair of the inaugural Digital Government Society Election Committee.  In 2008 and 2009 he is serving as the dg.o conference Co-Chair and the Co-Chair of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States".

    In May 2006, Dr. Shulman became the Editor of the international Journal of E-Government, which has since been re-named the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.

    Dr. Shulman's vast experience and expertise in the fields of information technology and governance are welcomed additions to the NCDG research programs. For more information about Dr. Shulman please visit his personal website.
  • July 15, 2008: Citizen Relationship Management, a new book by former NCDG & PNG Fellow Alexander Schellong is now available. In short, the book explores Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in government. Based on an interdisciplinary literature review and multiple-case study design, a model of Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) is developed and discussed. For a full abstract and more information about the book, please visit the publisher's website here.
  • June 22, 2008: NCDG Fellow Sreela Sarkar has been awarded the 2008-2009 Graduate School Fellowship from UMass Amherst. She will use the fellowship to conduct field research in India. The Graduate School Fellowship is a competitive stipend program designed to assist superior students in pursuing graduate study and in completing the requirements for graduate degrees in the minimum possible time. Congratulations, Sreela!
  • May 27, 2008: NCDG Fellow Sreela Sarkar presented her research at the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Montreal. Sarkar presented a paper titled "Contesting Technology, Development and the Private Sector in Seelampur, India." She will contiue her research on technology and social change with field work in India for the 2008-2009 academic year.
  • May 22, 2008: NCDG Fellow Meelis Kitsing presented two posters at the 9th annual dg.o conference. Kitsing's posters were "Explaining the E-Government Success in Estonia" and " Brooks’ Versus Linus’ Law: An Empirical Test of Open Source Projects," a collaborative project with NCDG Associate Director Charles Schweik and Fellows Robert English and Sandra Haire. For a list of all NCDG presentations, please click here.
  • April 15, 2008: Former NCDG fellow Jeffrey Boase has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. There he will continue his research on the social implications of mobile and computer mediated communication. He will also be actively involved in the Center for Mobile Communication Studies. Dr. Boase received his PhD from the University of Toronto in the summer of 2006 and is currently working as postdoctoral scholar at University of Tokyo.
  • January 25, 2008: NCDG Fellow Meelis Kitsing is part of the core research team contributing to the UN E-Government Survey 2008: From e-Government to Connected Governance. The survey, just released this month, assesses the new role of the government in 192 member states of the UN in enhancing public service delivery, while also improving the efficiency and productivity of government processes and systems. Findings suggest that e-government success and/or failure in the states depends more on human resources and institutional readiness than technological developments. For a copy of the report, click here [PDF].

News in 2007:

  • December 13, 2007: David Lazer, NCDG co-founder and director of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University, comments on the use of familial DNA searches in two NPR stories. Click here for the first story; click here for the second story. Both stories are part of NPR's three-part series on the Ethics of DNA Use.
  • December 13, 2007: A free sample of the new journal, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, is now available online. Click here for the PDF sample.
  • November 10, 2007: NCDG's website has been listed among the top 300 websites for online Political Science research by IPSAportal. Managed by an International Editorial Board and updated on a regular basis, IPSAportal is an official publication of the International Political Science Association launched at the 20th IPSA World Congress (Fukuoka, Japan, July 2006). For more information about IPSAportal, please visit their website.
  • October 20, 2007: Associate professor of Communication at UMass Amherst and NCDG Faculty Affiliate, Paula Chakravartty has co-edited a new book about global communication entitled Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy. Faculty Affiliate Mari Castañeda is a contributor to the work. For a short article on the book click, here. To order a copy of the book from the publisher, click here.
  • October 9, 2007: Jane Fountain was an invited panelist at the Digital Democracy and Freedom of Speech web conference held in the WHYY studios in Philadelphia, PA on October 9, 2007. The entire conference is archived at the WHYY website until December 31, 2007. Click here for the PDF poster. We encourage you to use the video and resources available on the conference website to discuss freedom of speech in a digital era with your students and colleagues.
  • October 3, 2007: Associate Director Charlie Schweik presented a paper entitled: "Reflections of an Online Geographic Information Systems Course Based on Open Source Software" at the Free/Libre and Open Source Geospatial Conference in Victoria Canada, September 24-27, 2007. The paper, currently under review at the Social Science Computer Review, can be found here as a NCDG working paper.
  • September 28, 2007: The National Center for Digital Government welcomed a delegation of government and technology business leaders from Kazakhstan as part of the U.S. Department of State's International Visitors Leadership Program [more PDF].
  • September 26, 2007: Two different interviews with Jane Fountain at the 4th Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Lisbon, Portugal are now available online. For the print interview click here. For the television interview click here. (Dr. Fountain's interview starts at 38:50).
  • September 26, 2007: Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and director of the National Center for Digital Government, spoke at the opening plenary session of the 4th Ministerial eGovernment Conference held in Lisbon, Portugal on September 19-21, 2007. Fountain was invited to address the delegates on the relationship of e-government to growth and employment in the European Union as part of a live debate which included the deputy secretary-general of the OECD and European ministers. Biographies of speakers, the conference program, and interviews with e-government experts, including Professor Fountain, are available at the conference website: http://www.megovconf-lisbon.gov.pt

    Fountain recommended that officials examine best practices in cross-jurisdictional initiatives and work to strengthen ‘communities of practice’ among civil servants and those studying to enter the public sector.  She also noted that “e-government has reached a level of maturity that moves it beyond simple service provision, and e-government forward-looking emphasis should shift more in the direction of the best avenues for institutional redesign.”

    While in Europe, Fountain was also the featured speaker at the Conference on e-Business in Alicante, Spain, held at the European Union’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, the EU’s trademark and design agency. Fountain’s presentation, “Building a Virtual State? Cross-Agency Initiatives in Government,” discussed how government actors and agencies redesign information and decision making flows to create new processes capable of functioning across traditional bureaucratic boundaries.

  • September 4, 2007: Jane E. Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, has joined two dozen prominent researchers, government officials, and business professionals to evaluate the federal e-Rulemaking initiative through the American Bar Association’s Committee on the Status and Future of Federal e-Rulemaking.

    The Committee, chaired by Sally Katzen, Director of the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) during the Clinton Administration, was created to examine and provide recommendations on the funding, design, and implementation of the four year old e-government initiative. It is organized under the auspices of the Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association and is supported by grants from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.

    A report documenting the Committee’s findings will be released at the end of the year and is expected to include short- and long-term recommendations for congressional, presidential, and administrative actions needed for the initiative’s success.

    Commissioned in 2002 by the E-Government Act of 2002, e-Rulemaking is an effort to move paper-and-pencil rulemaking to the web. Such a move is expected to improve access to rulemaking documents and allow for better searching and sorting of proposed rules and comments. The initiative plans to move all federal rulemaking documents online by the end of 2007.  Information about the e-Rulemaking initiative is available at www.Regulations.gov.

  • August 20, 2007: Associate Director, Charles M. Schweik has been awarded a grant from the USDA Forest Service to develop an online carbon calculator. Read a press release here. [PDF]
  • July 2007: The abstract submission deadline for ICEGOV2007 - International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance has been extended to 30 July 2007. Visit the ICEGOV website for more information.
  • June 1, 2007: NCDG Fellow, Bob English, and NCDG Associate Director, Charlie Schweik, presented a paper entitled "Identifying Success and Tragedy of Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) Commons: A Preliminary Classification of Sourceforge.net projects" at the First International Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development, part of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering on May 21, 2007. This paper may be the first of its kind to report classifying all the open source projects stored in the repository Sourceforge.net (more than 107,000 projects at the time of data collection) along a success/failure metric. Click here for a PDF preprint of their paper.

  • May 14, 2007: Post-Doctoral Research Fellow J. Ramon Gil-Garcia has accepted an offer to become an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Center of Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City, Mexico this fall. Gil-Garcia will be joining an internationally recognized group of faculty and teaching for the number 1 ranked MPA program in Mexico. Congratulations, Ramon! For more information about Ramon's accomplishments at NCDG, please see our publication and presentation pages.

  • May 10, 2007: NCDG Director, Jane E. Fountain gave an invited lecture in Oslo, Norway at an EU sponsored conference organized by the Research Council of Norway and the European eGovernment Research Network on May 4, 2007. See the full press release here [PDF]. For a Norwegian article on Professor Fountain's lecture in Norway click here. (For the English translation click here)

  • May 9, 2007: The Open Source/Linux Lab at UMass Amherst is looking for a qualified undergraduate or graduate student in the Five College area to fill an on-campus IBM Internship position for August 1, 2007-August 1, 2008, with probable continuation for 2008-09 school year assuming adequate performance. Primary responsibilities include Administration of a Linux (Ubuntu) computer network and research support servers. See the full announcement [PDF] for more information.

  • April 19, 2007: University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student, Andrei Semenov, will defend his thesis on April 24th, 2007 at 12:00pm in Holdsworth Hall 312A. Semenov's thesis is titled: "Building Online Communities in Forestry: The Cases of Timberia.org and the UrbanEcologyCollaborative.org".

    In his thesis, Semenov reports his efforts to design and develop a web-based social networking and content management system called "the Open Research System version 4.0" (an NCDG-affilated project managed by Professor Charlie Schweik). The Open Source Research System version 4.0 currently supports the Urban Ecology Collaborative (UEC), a partnership of universities, non-profit organizations and federal, state, and local officials working in Eastern United States cities. The Open Research System 4.0 is the underlying web-service "engine" that runs the UEC collaboration website. The live site can be found at: urbanecologycollaborative.org. The overarching purpose of the collaborative is to "cultivate healthy, safe and vibrant cities through collective learning and united action."

  • April 5, 2007: Charles Schweik and David Greenberg (Mohawk Trail Regional School District) have received a CITI Grant to offer a summer professional development course for high school teachers to explore the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) software in their classes. See MTRSD's press release for more information about the summer course.

  • March 26, 2007: Charles Schweik presented “Examining the Structure of Internet-based Open Source Software Collaborations” in the IT-enabled Collaboration for Research, Innovation, and Management Panel at the American Society of Public Administration conference, March 25, 2007, Washington D.C. See the slides from his presentation here [PDF Slides 847KB]

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News in 2006:

  • December 29, 2006: NCDG welcomes Andrew McCallum as an Affiliated Faculty member. See Andrew's website for more information on his research: http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/

  • December 27, 2006: Charlie Schweik comments on creating a "tech-savvy workforce" and the UMass Amherst IT minor in Network World. Click here to read the article.

  • December 7, 2006: Jane Fountain gave an invited lecture titled "E-Government and Development: Key Challenges" at the World Bank's Workshop, "Small States: Growth Challenges and Development Solutions" today. See a brief article on her lecture here.

  • November 15, 2006: The Journal of Information Technology and Politics is seeking manuscripts "on the challenges and opportunities presented by information technology in politics and government." See the PDF call for papers here.

  • November 10, 2006: A video of Jane Fountain's Keynote Speech "The Semantic Web and Networked Governance: Promise and Challenges," given at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference in Athens, GA is now available online. An abstract of the speech is available here, and an interview with Fountain is available here.

  • November 8, 2006: Charlie Schweik, NCDG's Associate Director; Maria Fernandez; Alexander Stepanov; Jim Peters; and Mike Hamel will present a poster at today's 5 College GIS Day, held at Amherst College. The poster, "Introduction to GIS Using Free Software" will introduce attendees to Schweik's online FOSS GIS course at UMass Amherst and offer a demonstration of Quantum GIS. View PDF Poster. View PDF Handout.

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  • September 1, 2006: Mark your calendars! On September 28 @ 4pm the UMass IT Program will hold its first seminar of the semester:"Dynamic Digital Maps" with Chris Condit. More information is available here.

  • August 29, 2006: NCDG is pleased to welcome Meelis Kitsing to the Center as a Doctoral Fellow. For information about all our fellows please click here.

  • August 21, 2006: Jane Fountain comments on e-government cost savings in "Congress wants to see the savings on e-gov" in Federal Computer Week.

  • August 21, 2006: A brief article about Jane Fountain's international keynotes and lectures is available here.

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  • NCDG is pleased to announce that Charles Schweik has been appointed as the Center's Associate Director. [An August, 2006 article highlighting the appointment is available here.]
  • February 2006: The Open Source Computing Laboratory is now affiliated with NCDG.

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