The World e-Governments Organization of Cities and Local Governments (WeGO) are launching the 1st WeGO awards in 2012. The WeGO Awards aim to recognize and promote outstanding practices in e-government of cities and local governments that use information and communication technologies to improve administrative efficiency and citizens' access to public services.
Awards Categories
WeGO Awards are given in the following five categories:
-Services
-Efficiency
-Open City
-Urban Management
-Digital Divide
NCDG signed a memorandum of understanding with the World e-Governments Organization of Cities and Local Governments (WeGO) to cooperate in sharing good practices and knowledge, conducting joint research in the field of digital government, developing effective methods and techniques for the digital government, publicizing news and events of the counterpart organization, and organizing joint seminars and participating in the seminars of the counterpart organization.
NCDG Director Jane E. Fountain and UMass Amherst Chancellor Robert Holub signed the memorandum representing NCDG. WeGO was represented by President Won Soon Park and Secretary General Jong Sung Hwang (in the above photo).
Collaborations between WeGO and NCDG are expected to enhance global recognition and research capacity of the two organizations.
Charlie Schweik, Associate Director of NCDG, is the lead author of Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Commons forthcoming 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.
December 6, 2011:Maxat Kassen, Associate Professor at the Eurasian National University in Astana, Kazakhstan, School of Journalism and Political Science, Department of Television and Public Relations, gave a talk entitled, "Development of e-Government in Kazakhstan: Case Study of a Transitional Country.". 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.
October 9, 2011: 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.
October 3, 2011: Conor White-Sullivan, NCDG undergraduate fellow 2009-2010, sold Localocracy, an online platform to engage citizens, elected officials and journalists in local issues, to AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group. Along with two of his co-founders, Conor White-Sullivan, 23, will join Huffington Post Media Group and continue to expand their approach to enhancing democracy online. Read More in The Boston Globe, Mass High Tech, and Bloomberg.
August 31 , 2011: Charlie Schweik, NCDG Associate Director, gave an invited keynote address at the Military Open Source Software Conference in Atlanta Georgia. His talk, “Successful Internet Collaboration: A Study of Open Source Software Commons,” drew on Schweik's extensive research concerning the use of open source software nationally and internationally and its potential for generating productive collaborations among researchers and others.
January 29, 2011: Jane Fountain moderated a session on New Media and the Future of Government for journalists, business executives, government officials, and NGO leaders at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Friday, January 28. Fountain was 1 of approximately 60 women world-wide invited to the meeting. [more]
News in 2010: December 29, 2010: Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change, by Jane E. Fountain, has been re-translated into Chinese by Renmin University Press under the direction of former NCDG fellow, Ruixin Zhang. Building the Virtual State has also been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish (forthcoming).
November 16, 2010: Jane Fountain, Director of the National Center for Digital Government, gave the keynote address at the national electronic government conference, eFörtvaltings Dargna 2010 (eGovernment Days 2010), in Stockholm, Sweden on November 16. Read More
November 15, 2010: Charlie Schweik, NCDG Associate Director, is part of a $150,000 Massachusetts Department of Education grant with the Gateway Regional School District. “Putting Western Massachusetts on the Map: A Course in GIS” will give teachers in Western Massachusetts both face-to-face and online training (using MassONE Moodle) in open source GIS software over the course of 22 months. Read more
November 1, 2010: Conor White-Sullivan, former NCDG Fellow, and his Localocracy team were selected as winners of the prestigious Poynter Institute Entrepreneurial Journalism Prize. Read more about localocracy and the prize here
October 30, 2010: Localocracy, the e-democracy company founded by NCDG Fellow Conor White-Sullivan, was featured in "Point and Click Politics" in the Wall Street Journal.Read the full article here.
October 15, 2010: The Digital Government Society annouces the 12th International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2011). The meeting with take place June 12–15, 2011, at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. View the full call for papers [pdf]
September 22, 2010: Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government was a keynote speaker at Portugal Tecnológico 2010 on September 22, 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal. Fountain’s address, “The transformational effect of web technologies on government” examined "Gov 2.0.” Video of her presentation is available online (beginning around 1.28) [more]
July 19, 2010: Toks Oyedemi, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has received a 2010 Student Research Grant from the NCDG.
The award will help Oyedemi conduct doctoral field research on the pattern and quality of Internet access and the role of technology in social change in South Africa. [more]
June 18, 2010: Scientists at UMass Amherst, including NCDG Associate Director Charlie Schweik, have launched the Mobile Gulf Observatory (MoGO) iPhone application to help save wildlife in the gulf. Visit savegulfwildlife.org.
June 1, 2010: R. Erdem Erkul, 2008-2009 NCDG Doctoral Fellow, was elected to the European Commission Informatics Portal Informal Expert Committee on epractice.eu. Epractice.eu is a European Commission egovernment portal for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners.
May, 2010: NCDG Fellow, Jeffrey Rothschild, was awarded a 21st Century Leader Award at the UMass Amherst 2010 Commencement. The award is given annually to recognize graduating seniors who have demonstrated exemplary standards of achievement, initiative and social awareness. Congratulations, Jeff!
May, 2010: Jane Fountain, Raquel Galindo, and Jeffrey Rothschild have published a new case study on the European Union's Office of Harmonization for the Internal Market (OHIM). The case study is part of NCDG's research on the management innovations implemented at the OHIM. Click here for more information on this project and to download the case study.
March 10, 2010: 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]
February 25, 2010: Slides from the February 2010 AAAS workshop "National Science Foundation and Ethics in Science and Engineering" are now available through the ESENCe website. [more]
February 20, 2010: 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], and presentation slides are available through Slideshare.
February 10, 2010: 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.
February 9, 2010: 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.
News in 2009:
December 28, 2009: 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)
*eGOVsharE 2009* Conference is a joint effort of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the eGovernment Centre (eDEM) of Public Administration Institute for Turkey and Middle East (TODAIE), the Turkish International Cooperation & Development Agency (TÄ°KA), in collaboration with the Statistical Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRIC). eGOVsharE 2009 will be held
in Antalya on 8-11 December 2009 under the coordination of eDEM (eGovernment Center of TODAIE).
For decades, governments have been trying to be a part of eSociety by introducing eGovernment Projects; however, they have been facing many challenges in achieving officially declared goals. It's an obvious fact that, instead of reinventing the wheel, exchange of experiences and collaborative actions are irreplaceable and vital instruments to overcome challenges for the success of eGovernment Projects.
The main objective of *eGOVsharE2009* is to provide a platform for leaders, public managers and professionals, researchers as well as academics from all over the world to share their practices, ideas and research results. Furthermore, the conference will try to explore collaboration potentials through the exchange of practical experiences in eGovernment project implementations within the region as well.
Professor Fountain will also be lecturing and meeting with researchers, advocates and government decisionmakers in Ankara and Instanbul following the conference.
November 12, 2009: Jane Fountain has been appointed to the World Economic Forum's Council on the Future of Government for a second year. The Future of Governments Council examines globally the public sector’s response to technological change, particularly how technological innovation impacts transparency, accountability, and civil society. Fountain is one of fourteen expertise invited to serve on this council. [PDF press release]
November 9, 2009: The National Center for Digital Government (NCDG) co-sponsored the 2nd Korea-U.S. Information and Communication Technology-Based Policy Forum at the World Bank on November 5, 2009. [more]
October 30, 2009: Researchers in the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at UMass Amherst and the University of Pittsburgh have launched a free, Web-based beta version of
the Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT) to enable government officials to listen to and engage with the American public about regulations that impact their lives and businesses. [more]
September 18, 2009: Stuart Shulman, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been invited to serve on the “Committee to Investigate the Relationship between Threatening Communications and Actual Behavior” within the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Secret Service.
The Committee, appointed by the National Research Council’s Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences, designed and will conduct a two day workshop on the relationship between threatening communication sent to Secret Service protectees and actual behavior.
According to the National Research Council, research on the relationship of communication to risky behavior does not exist. The workshop is a first step toward examining communication factors and sparking a new research initiative within the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC). Findings from the workshop will provide NTAC with a foundation to build stronger strategies and more effective tools to defend those under Secret Service protection.
The workshop will take place September 22-23, 2009 in Washington D.C.
More information about the committee is available here.
September 2009: NCDG Director, Jane Fountain, is featured in a cover story in Informatics magazine (Turkey) about the future of e-government. To read the complete Turkish version, click here. An English version of the article is available through www.digital-government.net, which is edited by R. Erdem Erkul, 2008-2009 Fellow.
September 2009: Matthew Hindman, 2003-2004 NCDG Fellow, has recently published The Myth of Digital Democracy with Princeton University Press.
August 7, 2009: Raquel Galindo Dorado, NCDG Fellow, and Jane Fountain are partnering to explore management innovations at the Office of Harmonization in the Internal Market in Spain. Together, they will produce a case study documenting OHIM's e-business strategies, which will be available for use in graduate classrooms in late 2009.
July 30, 2009: NCDG Fellow Erdem Erkul is now in the top ten contributors to the European Union's E-Practice website among more than 16,000 contributors.
July 14, 2009: Meelis Kitsing (NCDG fellow) and Philip Howard (Stanford) have published a new working paper on internet diffusion. Read Turning Dirt Roads into Information Highways at the WIA Report website.
July 13, 2009: Research presented at the YouTube and the 2008 Election Conference has been published in the July issue of Politics Magazine. The article, "Learning from YouTube" presents findings of four research projects conducted by LaChrystal Ricke, Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati, Kevin Wallsten, and Chirag Shah. The YouTube Conference was organized by NCDG Associate Director Stuart Shulman.
June 22, 2009: NCDG, the Korean National Information Society Agency (NIA), the Center for Advanced Technology Strategy, and the International Academy of CIO are hosting the 2nd Korea-U.S. ICT Policy Forum at the World Bank in Washington DC on November 5, 2009. Visit the forum's website for more information.
May 21, 2009: Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government and Marilyn Billings, Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst, have been awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Integrative Research to beta test cybertools and cyberinfrastructure for an interdisciplinary, multimedia, and international online beta repository to support ethics in science and engineering. The project is based at the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The project was developed to respond to new federal legislation, the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act. The beta site will be designed to guide faculty in science and engineering to ethics resources to support mentoring and training primarily of graduate and post-doctoral researchers. Use of web 2.0 tools and an international approach will enable more effective training of future generations of scientists, engineers, and research scholars and contribute to a more responsible and ethically-trained workforce.
According to Fountain, “the ability to freely, quickly and easily locate and review materials for use in training future generations of scientists and engineers is invaluable. A beta site that compiles existing materials with the objective of making them as freely and easily accessible and useful as possible, while incorporating web 2.0 and social networking tools that might enhance and expand usability, is the starting point for a national digital library for the 21st Century. A PDF press release is available here.
April 18, 2009: NCDG Director Jane Fountain discusses the advantages and possible drawbacks of using technology to promote transparency in government operations. Read more here.
April 16, 2009: For coverage of the YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle Conference visit Masslive.com (story 1; story 2) and WWLP TV. You can also watch the conference live at Panopto.com (use username "guest" and password "youtube")
March 17, 2009: Seok-Jin Eom, former NCDG Fellow, has joined the faculty at Soon Chun Hyang University in Asan, South Korea. Congratulations, Seok-Jin!
January, 2009: NCDG is pleased to welcome R. Erdem Erkul to the Center as a Doctoral Research Fellow. Erdem is a PhD candidate at Ankara University in Turkey and a researcher at Hacettepe University. More information about his research interests is available here.
January, 2009: MASSPIRG has released a new report highlighting the benefits and need for an open and transparent state budget. The report, Transparency.gov 2.0, Using the Internet for budget transparency to increase accountability, efficiently and taxpayer confidence, is available here.
October, 2008: Be sure to check out the new research underway by Charlie Schweik and Bob English on the success, failure, and collaborative features of open source software at their new NCDG research page. There you will find information about their forthcoming book, lists of publications and presentations and even links to their data.
September 24, 2008:
Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Director of the National Center for Digital Government, and Director of the Science, Technology and Society Initiative has been appointed to the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Governments. Fountain is one of thirteen experts worldwide selected for membership on the Future of Governments Council, which will examine how governments globally might better adapt to the rapid pace of technological change while building or maintaining transparency, accountability, and civil society.
Best known for the annual meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum has developed multi-stakeholder dialogue in key policy arenas globally. According to the World Economic Forum, “The Summit on the Global Agenda is a new, unique gathering of the world’s most influential thinkers – leaders from academia, business, government and society. Its purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. This inaugural Summit of the members of the Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, the world's foremost intelligence and knowledge network, will be held in partnership with the Government of Dubai on 7-9 November.”
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum is an independent, international organization convening world leaders and government officials in dialogue with leading researchers and experts to develop “global, regional and industry agendas.” Working through a series of Global Agenda Councils, the World Economic Forum convenes the most innovative and relevant leaders capable of capturing the best knowledge on each key issue and integrating it into global collaboration and decision-making processes.
“The World Economic Forum should be commended for bringing these issues to an international forum. There is much to be accomplished through the Council as governments face critical challenges in their use of technology,” Fountain said. “The Global Agenda Councils further a tradition of global dialogue and agenda setting among policymakers, industry, government officials, and researchers.”
September 23, 2008: NCDG Fellow Sreela Sarkar received an honorable mention for her research on New Media Technologies and Empowerment among Minority Women in Seelampur from the Social Science Research Council. Congratulations Sreela!
September 9, 2008: Congratulations to NCDG Associate Director Stuart Shulman for winning the American Political Science Association ITP Section Best Computer Software Award! Stu won for his Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT), a web-based
suite of tools designed to facilitate efficient and effective analysis of large databases of text. An article further describing the CAT and Stu's award is available in the ITP newsletter (page 15).
September 1, 2008: NCDG Fellow Meelis Kitsing has been elected to the Executive Committee of the American Political Science Association's Information Technology and Politics section. He is the first graduate student elected to serve on the committee. Congratulations, Meelis!
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".
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]
February 20, 2007: The NCDG is pleased to welcome Sreela Sarkar as a 2007 NCDG Pre-Doctoral Fellow. More information about Sreela and all the NCDG fellows is available here.
February 15, 2007: Charlie Schweik and Robert English's article "Tragedy of the FOSS Commons? Investigating the Institutional Designs of Free/Libre and Open Source Software Projects" is now available in the online journal, First Monday. Click here for the article.
February 13, 2007: NCDG was pleased to host Shiyang Yu, Division Director of the State Information Center in Beijing, China on February 12. The visit to NCDG was intended to spark collaboration between US and Chinese researchers and included a presentation on "E-Government in China" by Shiyang. More information on the presentation is available here.
January 7, 2006: The Center for Technology in Government has awarded funds to the digital government working group "A Comparative and Transnational Research Agenda in North America," of which NCDG Director Jane Fountain and NCDG Post Doc J. Ramon Gil Garcia are members. See the CTG Press Release here.
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 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.
October 13, 2006: NCDG is pleased to welcome Seok-Jin Eom to the Center as a Doctoral Fellow. For information about all our fellows please click here.
October 10, 2006: Jane Fountain will lead a seminar on "Institutional Transformation of Government in the Network Society" for the Irish Institute at Boston College on October 12, 2006 as part of the Institute's e-Governance Program for government officials from Dublin and Belfast.
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.
June 27, 2006: Charlie Schweik to give a presentation on "The Design and Functionality of the Open Research System (Version 3.0)" at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study Quarterly Science Meeting on "Sensors, Sensor Networks, and Cyberinfrastructure". University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus.
"Public sector decision-making and the potential of open source and open content collaboration in Ecoinformatics" Presented by NCDG Associate Director Charles Schweik
"Enacting Inter-Organizational E-Government in the Mexican Federal Government." Poster presented by NCDG Fellow Gil-García, J. Ramón and Luis F. Luna-Reyes
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.]
Amherst, MA: Registration for the Center for Public Policy and Administration's IT Conference for Nonprofits is now open. Register online by May 10, 2006.
February 2006: The Open Source Computing Laboratory is now affiliated with NCDG.
Professor Jane Fountain was a keynote speaker at the 2005 International Conference on "Knowledge Management in Asia Pacific," held in Wellington, New Zealand, on November 28th. Click here for full press release.
Former NCDG fellow Kenneth Cukier, currently on the staff of the Economist, publishes an article "Who Will Control the Internet?" on Internet Governance in Foreign Affairs.
The ITP news, the official newsletter of the Information Technology & Politics, is now archived on the ITP Research Database Wiki and is also available at the ITP webiste.
Op-Ed by David Lazer and Frederick Bieber, " Shaking the Family Tree ", regarding the DNA sweeps in Truro, MA.
Former NCDG fellow, Professor V.K. Samaranayake, in Sri Lanka is asking for help with relief efforts for those affected by the recent tsunamis in south Asia . To assist with this effort UCSC set up the website http://www.emergencydonations.com/ for online donations to the Prime Minister's relief fund. UCSC is also associated with http://relief.cno.gov.lk/ and http://www.emergencyinfo.gov.lk/. Donations can also be made directly to the Sri Lankan President's office at http://www.cnosrilanka.org/.
Jane Fountain, " Governing the Virtual Sate ," invited presentation at IST2004, session on "Governance in Transformation," the Hague , November 15-17, 2004 . The general purpose of the IST (European Information Society Technologies) Conference was to look at ways to harness information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance the prosperity, security and quality of life for all Europeans
Dream Project is a non-profit organization committed to promoting economic growth and improving the quality of life in China's rural areas through comprehensive summer assistance programs consisting of teaching, information dissemination, consulting services and technology promotion.
David Lazer and Frederick Bieber article in the New Scientist October 23, 2004 , on whether a person's DNA should be used by the law to carry out surveillance on their family.
The Internet Governance Project (IGP) issued a set of reports today analyzing the current " state of play " in Internet governance, and calling upon the United Nations to make fundamental decisions to safeguard the functioning of the Internet.
Jane Fountain featured as one of five visionaries in Government Technology, Special Issue, Visions, August 2003.
Web Media Diversity Resource Page: An essay and links on power laws, the Web and media concentration, by Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier. (September 19, 2003)
On Tuesday 16th September in conjunction with the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, NCDG hosted First Deputy Mayor Michael Enright and CitiStat Director Matt Gallagher from the City of Baltimore, who presented to representatives from Boston-area cities and Massachusetts State departments on the use of information technology in managing Baltimore City resources.
Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier's June 2, 2003 Op-Ed in the New York Times, More News, Less Diversity
Matt Hindman on Australian Public Radio: FCC decision (audio/text)
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
