Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science Jane Fountain has accepted chairmanship of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. This marks her third year on the Council.
An independent international organization, the World Economic Forum seeks to improve the state of the world by partnering with leaders in order to shape global, regional, and industry agendas. It created the Network of Global Agenda Councils in 2008, combining the intelligence and cooperation of academia, government, business, and other fields to address key challenges in various world affairs. Each Council serves as an advisory board to the Forum, governments, international organizations, and other interested parties and is comprised of between fifteen and twenty members. The Network as a whole consists of upwards of 1000 members from more than fifty countries.
Professor Fountain is the founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, which was established with support from the National Science Foundation to develop research and infrastructure for the emerging field information technology and governance. She also directs the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Initiative, a campus-wide effort based at the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts. The STS Initiative is designed to build social science, policy, and cross-disciplinary research on a range of social, political, and economic challenges posed by science and technology. Fountain is the Principal Investigator of the Ethics in Science and Engineering Online Resource Beta Site project and of the International Dimensions of Ethics in Science and Engineering project (IDEESE).
Fountain is the author of Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), which was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her articles have been published in scholarly journals including Governance, Technology in Society, Science and Public Policy, the National Civic Review, and The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
On top of chairing the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government, she served on the American Bar Association Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of e-Rulemaking and has served on several advisory bodies for organizations including the Social Science Research Council, the Internet Policy Institute, and the National Science Foundation. She has delivered invited lectures and keynote addresses and has worked with governments and research institutions including the World Bank, the European Commission, Knowledge Management Asia Pacific, Japan, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Chile, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.