The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Faculty Research

Categories
Alumni news CPPA & university administration Events Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Student news

2010 CPPA Newsletter Available Online

The 2009- 2010 academic year was a busy time for the Center for Public Policy and Administration.  We welcomed new students, new faculty, new research and projects, and, of course, got settled in our new office space in Gordon Hall.  More information about all these new activities as well as other highlights from our faculty, students, and alumni from the past year are available in our annual newsletter, now available online.

Below, we reproduce the newsletter’s letter from the director as an introduction to the jam-packed annual report.  To go directly to the newsletter, click here [PDF]

——————————————————

Dear friends,

With my garden and local agricultural farm share overflowing with healthy food, I can’t resist gardening metaphors this time of year. Each year CPPA plants a new crop of students and research projects, sowing seeds of knowledge.

We see our students blossom over their first year. They grow during their summer internships—this year they completed internships all over the world, from the Philippines to Guatemala to New Orleans, and just up I-91 in Greenfield, MA—and produce exciting projects in their second year. We look forward to seeing these experiences ripen into capstone projects this spring.

In May, we sent another crop of new professionals out into the policy world to join our alumni. We’ll miss their engaging questions in class, their tireless energy, and their entrepreneurial spirit—this was the class that created and nurtured the Policy and Administration Graduate Council to provide a voice for CPPA students. Our incoming class carries on the tradition of geographical diversity, with students from China, Ukraine, Bolivia, and Japan, and from the US, from Mississippi to Massachusetts.
As always, our faculty are busy tending their own policy research gardens. Joya Misra and Susan Newton created an exciting grants workshop for UMass faculty. We also have a new crop of books, grants, and honors. Our faculty and their research have influenced environmental, science, economic, and social policy, with their research showing up in national and international advisory panels, prestigious research centers, and courtrooms. This fall we’re delighted to welcome Dr. Steven Boutcher to the CPPA faculty. He’ll teach a course on social movements and public policy next spring.

Some big news from this past academic year is already producing exciting new programs. A distinguished review panel complimented us on the quality of our program and the interdisciplinary connections we’ve created across campus. They inspired us to create an accelerated program that would allow talented undergraduates in the Five Colleges to get a BA and MPP in five years. We’re also working on online certificate programs.
As an amateur gardener, I am most excited when an improbable plant emerges. At CPPA, we are delighted to move into a wonderful building, Gordon Hall. Please stop by the next time you’re on campus to see what our center has grown into: a beautiful and lively place for students, faculty, and staff to grow and produce new ideas and research that will lead to action!

With your help, we are also planting seeds for long-run growth. The generosity of alumni, staff, and faculty has kept our scholarship fund growing over the past year. I encourage you to support the next generation of policy professionals by giving to this fund!

Yours,
Lee Badgett

Categories
Faculty Research

Fountain gives keynote address at Portugal Technologico 2010

Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, gave a keynote address at Portugal Tecnológico 2010 on September 22, 2010 at the Parque das Nacoes in Lisbon, Portugal.

Fountain’s address, “The transformational effect of web technologies on government”  examined the increasing usage of Web 2.0 tools in government, commonly referred to as “Gov 2.0.” According to Fountain, “Gov 2.0 signals government’s emphasis on the latest digital technologies for providing services and information, for policymaking, and for advancing the technology agenda of innovative national governments.”

These government agendas vary widely across countries. In the US, the Obama administration has viewed transparency through the Web as paramount to Gov 2.0 and launched an “open government” initiative. The release of data.gov, for instance, was an attempt to make government data freely available to anyone with an Internet connection.  In the European Union, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) has been a leader in ensuring interoperability, redesigning business processes for technological efficiency, and creating knowledge networks that work across governments and agencies to promote economic vitality and social well being.

Fountain, with Raquel Galindo-Dorado and Jeffrey Rothschild, has produced a case study based on OHIM’s transformation. The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market: Creating a 21st Century Public Agency is freely available in both English and Spanish through the National Center for Digital Government. The OHIM case study presents some of the most innovative and advanced sources of new and promising practices for using digital technologies to improve government processes.  The agency is an example of a government office that understood the importance of technological advancements in conjunction with institutional transformation.

More information about the Portugal Tecnológico conference is available at their website:  English version | Portuguese version. Videos of all the conference’s the keynote addresses are available online. Professor Fountain’s address begins around 1:28.

a look at “open government,” and a view of knowledge networks that work across governments to promote economic vitality and social well being in knowledge economies.
Categories
Events Faculty Research

McDermott Featured Speaker at October 4 CPPA Faculty Colloquium

Kathryn McDermott, associate professor of education and public policy, will discuss “Diversity, Race-Neutrality, and Austerity: The Changing Politics of Urban Education” on Monday, October 4, at 12 p.m. in Thompson 620.  The talk is part of the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Fall 2010 Faculty Colloquium.

Professor McDermott’s research concerns political debates around school diversity and how these debates have been shaped in recent years by the emphasis on school performance and the financial crisis of 2008. 

McDermott’s analysis draws on case material from school districts in Boston, MA, Raleigh, NC, and Louisville, KY.  Her findings suggest that racial and socioeconomic diversity have become less and less part of public debates about urban schools, and that concerns about enhancing racial and socioeconomic diversity have become increasingly disconnected from strategies for improving school performance. 

She also will describe how recent race-neutral policies governing school assignment generate different political dynamics from previous generations of race-conscious policies.  

McDermott is the author of Controlling Public Education: Localism Versus Equity, and the forthcoming book, High Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability.  She is a specialist on state-level educational policies and has led a comprehensive study of Massachusetts’ capacity to implement educational reform. As an expert on policies to achieve educational equity, she also has examined the role of public policy in providing better access to higher education in New England.  McDermott has been at UMass Amherst since 1999 and holds a doctorate in political science from Yale University.

This talk is free and open to the public.  Brownbag lunches are welcome. For additional information, go to www.masspolicy.org or contact Kathy Colón (kcolon@pubpol.umass.edu).

Categories
Faculty Research

Bushouse “thinks big for policy change”

Professor Brenda Bushouse presented “Thinking Big for Policy Change” to the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts Leadership Institute for Political Impact on Saturday, September 11, 2010. The two-hour seminar provided the 40 Institute fellows with an opportunity to dream big in order to create economic justice, access to education, and freedom from violence. Participants worked through strategic decision-making to help realize those dreams through public policy concepts such as framing, venue, valence, timing and understanding the social construction of target groups.

One of the goals of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts is for local women to involve themselves in civic affairs, such as running for political offices. As a result, they created the Leadership Institute for Political Impact in order to train and encourage these future leaders to pursue their utmost potential.

A non-partisan initiative, the twelve-month Leadership Institute for Political Impact stresses personal leadership, community organizing, legislative process and policy, and running for political office. It provides women with education and support by means of intensive workshops, the development of county cohorts, and experienced mentors to help them gain confidence in their abilities as successful political leaders.

Bushouse, a professor of Political Science and Public Policy, has a background of studies that involve early childhood policy, nonprofit governance, and policy-making processes. Her book, Universal Preschool: Policy Change, Stability, and the Pew Charitable Trusts (2009), analyzes the creation of state-funded preschool programs and the impact of foundation funding in state policy-making processes. Currently, she is researching network methodologies and their usage as means to elevate the policy ideas of nonprofit organizations.

Categories
Faculty Research Public Engagement Project

Schalet’s Research on Teen Sexuality Featured in Salon, Time Magazine Online

Research by Amy Schalet on the different approaches of American and Dutch parents to teenagers’ sexual relationships has been picked up by journalists across the globe.  An article by Schalet in Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association, was recently featured in Salon and Time Online. Schalet has also been contacted by Dutch radio concerning her research.

Schalet is Assistant Professor of Sociology and a CPPA affiliate.  She also is a member of the UMass Public Engagement Project steering committee, which supports and trains UMass faculty members to help make a difference in the world.

Schalet’s research contrasts the attitudes of Dutch parents, who commonly allow their teenagers to spend the night with steady boyfriends or girlfriends, to those of American parents, who rarely condone such behavior.  Teen birth rates in the U.S. are 8 times as high as those in the Netherlands.  These findings have important implications for thinking about teen sexuality and possible approaches to sexual education.

Schalet’s work on teen sexuality has been featured in other widely-read publications in the past.  See, for example, an op-ed by Schalet in the Washington Post and an article that appeared on the website of Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit that helps young people make informed and responsible decisions about reproductive and sexual health.

Schalet will be a featured speaker at the CPPA Faculty Colloquium on Monday, December 6 (12-1 p.m., Thompson 620).     

Categories
CPPA & university administration Faculty Research

Fountain receives Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research

Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, is one of eight nationally acclaimed faculty members at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who will be presented the annual Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity at the Sixth Annual Faculty Convocation on Friday, October 1, 2010.

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. During the past decade, the National Center has sponsored research workshops, seminars, doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships and visiting faculty from throughout the world in addition to its active research programs.

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).  She is a co-principal investigator of the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE) and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing, a major nanoscience research center.  Fountain developed and directed the Women in the Information Age Project, which was established with a generous gift from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to conduct research on the participation of women in computing and information-technology related fields and, with its partner institutions, to increase the number of women experts in information and communication technologies.  She is an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at UMass Amherst.

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.

Professor Fountain is currently a member of the World Economic Forum Global Advisory 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.

The complete list of faculty receiving awards at the Convocation includes:

Jeffrey M. Davis, Department of Chemical Engineering
Jane E. Fountain, Department of Political Science; Center for Public
Policy and Administration
Lixin Gao, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Alice C. Harris, Department of Linguistics
Sigrid Miller Pollin, Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History
Leon J. Osterweil, Department of Computer Science
Vincent M. Rotello, Department of Chemistry
Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Department of Anthropology

More: http://www.umass.edu/loop/weeklybulletin/articles/109445.php

Categories
Faculty Research Science, technology & society

Fountain gives invited presentation at “CI Days”

Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government was an invited speaker at North Carolina State University’s “CI Days at NCSU: The Excitement and Future of Cyberinfrastructure,”  which took place September 7 and 8 at NC State.

CI Days explored how “some of the top minds in the world wrestle with how CI can be used to reach technological, organizational and intellectual goals.” Fountain’s presentation, “Cyberinfrastructure and Networked Governance,”  explored the Obama campaign — the first to use social media extensively — and the administration’s Open Government Initiative. Her presentation was part of a panel of experts who discussed how cyberinfrastructure can help institutions reach their organizational potential.

“Understanding cyberinfrastructure,” said Fountain “is important for understanding innovation, progress, and institutional change.” According to Fountain, typically slow-changing bureaucracies are using technology to improve business processes and increase transparency and accountability. Implementing these new technologies, however, does not create an immediate transformation.  In the case of government, “civil servants and organizational cultures play critical roles in allowing organizational change. These and other institutional characteristics of organizations must be fully examined before we can understand the true impact or potential of a new technology.”

CI Days was sponsored by Sponsored by Internet2 through a grant from the National Science Foundation, the NC State Office of Information Technology, and NC State’s Institute for Computational Science and Engineering.

Categories
Faculty Research

Badgett discusses impact of gay marriage in the Netherlands

M.V. Lee Badgett, Director of CPPA and author of When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage, discussed the effects of same-sex marriage in The Netherlands in an August 18 radio conversation on the Takeaway. Much of Badgett’s work is now being cited as US states like California examine the legality of bans on same-sex marriage.

In 2001, the Netherlands was the first country to legalize gay marriage. Badgett spent time in the Netherlands in the years after that legalization documenting the impact of same-sex marriage on Dutch society. Of interest, she found no evidence that legalizing same-sex marriage in the Netherlands harmed the institution of marriage or changed heterosexuals’ opinions about marriage.  It did, however, change how gay people saw their role in society.  An complete online podcast of Badgett’s discussion is available at the Takeaway’s website.

The Takeaway is a national morning news program produced in partnership with The New York Times, the BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston.

Categories
Faculty Research

Creative economy grant to spur CPPA Springfield initiatives

Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) has been awarded $40,000 by the UMass President’s Creative Economy Initiative to help create a center dedicated to alleviating poverty and inequality in Springfield and other western Massachusetts cities.

“CPPA is delighted by this award,” according to M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics and CPPA director. “It not only provides support for an important CPPA initiative, it signals the President Office’s commitment to developing strong cooperative relationships with the people of Springfield.”

Fred Rose, a lecturer at CPPA whose doctorate from Cornell University is in city and regional planning, developed the proposal that garnered the award. Previously, Rose was a lead organizer for the Pioneer Valley Project, a coalition of labor groups and religious organizations that works for social change in Springfield.

“Springfield is the sixth poorest city in the nation, which obviously hinders its development” notes Rose. “In addition, Springfield lacks the kind of community-based development agencies that have played leading roles in other communities.”

“At the same time,” Rose adds, “Springfield has many assets–including its incredible diversity, reforms promoted by the Finance Control Board, and a renewed commitment at the state level.”

The goal of CPPA’s new center is to “fill gaps in the existing economic development landscape of Springfield,” explains Rose. “UMass has the potential to play a positive role in the city’s revitalization.”

CPPA’s grant will enable it to explore the best strategies for organizing the new center this year, as well as identify other potential funding sources and formulate new projects and research that respond to authentic community needs and opportunities.

Contact: Susan Newton (snewton@pubpol.umass.edu or 413.577.0478)

Categories
Faculty Research

UMass Researchers Launch iPhone App to Rescue Oiled Gulf Coast Wildlife

Starting today, iPhone users who come upon oiled birds and other wildlife in the Gulf Coast region can immediately transmit the location and a photo to animal rescue networks using a free new iPhone app, MoGO, for Mobile Gulf Observatory. It was developed by four University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers to make it easier for the public to help save wildlife exposed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The UMass Amherst researchers hope the MoGO app will draw on the large network of “citizen scientists” who are as heartbroken as they are to witness the disaster for marine life and who are actively looking for ways to help save wildlife along the 14,000 miles of northern Gulf coastline.

Although rescue networks are in place and busy saving stranded wildlife, the task is enormous and trained staff too few. They just don’t have the people-power to cover all the territory from Louisiana to Florida. With over 400 wildlife species and 35 national wildlife refuges at risk, the Gulf is in crisis from the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

“That’s where citizen science comes in,” says UMass Amherst wildlife biologist Curt Griffin. As he explains, “The new app allows anyone who finds an oiled animal to be linked automatically by the phone to the Wildlife Hotline and also to contribute photos of the stranded animal and its GPS location coordinates to a database here on campus.”

Each report will alert wildlife stranding networks to deploy experts to rescue live animals for clean-up and medical treatment. Photos of oiled wildlife plus the GPS location will also be uploaded to MoGO’s comprehensive database for review by wildlife and fisheries experts using a Web browser. Users are also encouraged to upload their photos of dead marine and coastal wildlife, tar balls on beaches, oil slicks on water and oiled coastal habitats to the MoGO database.

The idea for the new app came to Charlie Schweik, associate director of the National Center for Digital Government, as he listened to yet another depressing story about the Gulf oil spill. Already working on invasive species mapping with computer scientist Deepak Ganesan, an expert in mobile phone and sensor systems, Schweik thought that experience might prove useful for inventorying damage in the Gulf. Smartphones such as the iPhone have several sensors including camera, GPS, audio and video, which can provide valuable data for such an application.

Schweik also turned to Griffin and Andy Danylchuk, a fisheries ecologist, his colleagues in UMass Amherst’s Natural Resources Conservation Department, to connect to the wildlife and fisheries community. Griffin and Danylchuk agreed that a mobile phone app in the hands of an army of “citizen scientists” would enhance recovery efforts by wildlife stranding networks. It could also increase the efficiency of state and federal efforts to monitor, assess and respond to the damage caused by the spill and engage the public to partner with natural resources agencies and researchers.

As Danylchuk points out, “The MoGO public database will help guide restoration efforts of vital coastal and marine habitats, and be used by scientists world-wide to assess the ecological impacts of the spill on the Gulf. The public database also allows scientists outside the Gulf region to participate in the assessment.”

The app takes advantage of “mobile crowdsourcing,” that is, the power of smart personal mobile devices to provide thousands of eyes and ears on the ground. Ganesan’s research group has designed a software framework called “mCrowd,” which simplifies the usual weeks- to months-long process of developing a new mobile crowdsourcing app. “It provides easy-to-use templates that can be tailored to a new application,” Ganesan explains. His mCrowd technology allowed the UMass Amherst team to create the MoGO app and infrastructure in a little more than a week.

Whether the project succeeds now rests on how well the word gets out to the public in the Gulf region, the researchers note. “Any person, on land or at sea, wishing to use the free app for their iPhone can go to www.savegulfwildlife.org for more information on how to get it on their iPhone,” Schweik says.

Listen to report on WFCR public radio.
Visit the Mobile Gulf Observatory Website, including free download of MoGo app