The University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Faculty Research Science, technology & society

Fountain Discusses Networked Governance with Gov Officials in Spain

Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government (NCDG),  traveled to Madrid and Alicante, Spain in February as part of her research on the European Union’s “paperless” Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM).

With Raquel Galindo, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Jeffrey Rothschild, NCDG Research Fellow and UMass political science senior, Fountain is writing a case study on the institutional challenges and opportunities OHIM faced in its transition to a paperless office.  While in Spain, Fountain met with OHIM’s president, managers and other agency leaders to discuss her research and tour OHIM facilities.

While in Spain, Fountain also met with leaders of the Escuola de Organization Industriel in Madrid and gave an invited lecture “Government 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges.” Video from Fountain’s presentation is available here.

The OHIM case study will be published in late March 2010 and will be posted to the NCDG website.

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Events Science, technology & society

CPPA, NCDG to host US Deputy Chief Technology Officer

The National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will host United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government Beth Noveck on Friday, October 30, 2009.

The Open Government Initiative, which Noveck directs, was founded after President Obama’s January 21, 2009 Memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on Transparency and Open Government. The memorandum announced the administration’s commitment to an “unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

As Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Noveck works to enable greater transparency and accountability, broader and more diverse citizen participation, and increased opportunities for government to government and citizen to government collaboration. Her lecture “Open Government: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration” will describe in greater detail the initiatives pursued by her office.

Noveck is author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (2009) and editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (2006). She is on leave as a professor of law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and McClatchy visiting professor of communication at Stanford University.

Noveck’s speech, “Open Government: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration,” will be October 30, 2009 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Isenberg School of Management, room 108. The event is open to the public, but RSVPs to ncdg@pubpol.umass.edu are strongly encouraged. The speech will also be streamed live through www.ncdg.org

The National Center for Digital Government is a research center based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Center for Public Policy and Administration and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. NCDG’s mission is to build global research capacity, to advance practice, and to strengthen the network of researchers and practitioners engaged in building and using technology and government.  It seeks to apply and extend the social sciences for research at the intersection of governance, institutions and information technologies. For more information about NCDG and the event, visit www.ncdg.org or call (413) 577-2354.

Categories
Events Science, technology & society

NCDG co-sponsors World Bank forum

The National Center for Digital Government (NCDG) is co-sponsoring the 2nd Annual US-Korea Information and Communication Technology-Based Policy Forum at the World Bank on November 5, 2009.

Building off of discussions from the 1st US-Korea Forum held in Seoul, Korea, this year’s forum provides a unique opportunity for dialog between Korean and U.S. experts on national information technology enablement, green IT, knowledge infrastructure, and job creation in a knowledge-based economy. The Forum will also act as the kick-off-meeting for a US-Korean committee for cooperation on IT policies.

The forum is organized by Korea’s National Information Society Agency and sponsored by NCDG, the Korean Ministry of Public Administration and Security, the World Bank, the Center for Advanced Technology Strategy, and Intel.

NCDG is a research center based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Center for Public Policy and Administration and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. NCDG’s mission is to build global research capacity, to advance practice, and to strengthen the network of researchers and practitioners engaged in building and using technology and government. For more information visit www.ncdg.org.

Categories
Science, technology & society

UMass Amherst Receives Federal Grant To Create Test Site For Digital Library on Ethical Research Practices

The University of Massachusetts Amherst has received a $250,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop an online digital library that contains research findings and other materials about the ethical and responsible conduct of research. The grant, from the NSF’s Office of Integrative Research, funds a beta, or test site.

The online depository at UMass Amherst will contain written, video, audio and other material that can be used to teach responsible and ethical research practices to undergraduate and graduate students, along with postdoctoral researchers.

The UMass Amherst project will be directed by Jane Fountain, professor of political science and public policy and director of the National Center for Digital Government and Science, Technology and Society (STS) Initiative, and Marilyn Billings, scholarly communication and special initiatives librarian at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library.

The project is being developed in response to a new federal law and will direct faculty from a range of academic disciplines to appropriate resources for their classrooms, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. The availability of a wide range of teaching materials and the ability to search for specific information is a key element of the project.

Fountain says, “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.” The materials collected by UMass researchers will provide a robust, up-to-date collection of multimedia, multi-purpose materials upon which a permanent site may be based, she says.

The federal law that created the project is called the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act.