The University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Events

Charles Schweik to Speak on the Open Source Commons

Charles Schweik, associate professor of Natural Resources Conservation and Public Policy, will discuss “Collaborative Principles in Open Source Commons” on Monday, March 1, at 12 p.m. in Thompson 620.  Schweik is also the founder and co-director of the UMass Amherst Open Source Laboratory.

This talk, part of the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Spring 2010 Faculty Colloquium, will draw on Professor Schweik’s extensive research over the past several years to understand factors leading to successful open source software collaborations. Although “open source” can have multiple meanings, it generally refers to software that is produced collaboratively and whose source code is freely available to the public for use or modification.  Schweik is especially interested in open source software as a “public good” and its potential as a global collaborative paradigm in many other contexts, including science, public policy and/or administration.

Professor Schweik, together with members of his research team, will report some of their findings on successful open source collaborations that come from one of the first empirical studies of its kind, analyzing more than 100,000 projects—those that failed as well as those that succeeded—and surveying more than 1,700 developers.

Charles Schweik’s research is supported by a NSF Early CAREER Development grant.  In other related work, he has worked closely with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, which promotes the use of open source GIS software, and has developed innovative online systems to aid local and regional efforts in the area of environmental management. His early research on changing landscapes has taken him to regions as remote as the forests of Nepal.  At UMass, he is currently an associate director of the National Center for Digital Government and an affiliated researcher with the Science, Technology, and Society Initiative.

Professor Schweik’s talk is free and open to the public.  Brownbag lunches are welcome.

Categories
Policy Viewpoints

Prison-based gerrymandering

Today on NPR, David Sommerstein from the Prison Policy Institute–based in nearby Northampton!–talked about prison-based gerrymandering.  As with many stories that have been featured in the run-up to the 2010 census, this one has implications beyond simply accounting for the number of people in a given area.

It turns out that prisoners’ legal residences are their prison cell, not where they call home or where they were living before they were convicted.  However, since in most cases prisoners can’t vote, the actual voting populations in precincts that host prisons have disproportionate influence.  This is because for congressional districts that wouldn’t meet the minimum population requirement except for their prison population, fewer voters are controlling a single representative, giving each voter more pull over the political process than voters in districts that meet the minimum requirement.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world: as of 2008, 1 in 100 Americans was in the penal system.  One reason for this is cultural: the prevalence and fear of violent crime and American ethos of individualism and personal responsibility mean that being “tough on crime”–showing zero tolerance for law-breakers and making the penal code ever more punitive–is always a political winner.  Since prisoners–and in many states, ex-cons–cannot vote, there is insufficient countervailing electoral influence against these policies by those with a personal stake, which is undemocratic on its own.

Another reason for our high incarceration rate is economic.  Prisons are a key source of employment in many areas with few other options, particularly rural areas.  This primes the pump for even increasing incarceration rates.  As long as there is a net transfer of population to rural areas from urban areas, where most crime happens, the voting power of people in those rural areas will increase relative to prisoners’ urban points of origin.  These people will then use this power to support policies that they may already agree with–e.g. mandatory minimum sentencing–but that also happen to correspond with their economic interests.  This trend is self-reenforcing: building more prisons will bring more electoral power, which will lead to more prisons, and so forth.  In essence, this system incentivizes voters to increase the punitiveness of law enforcement for reasons that have nothing to do with crime prevention or prisoner rehabilitation; in fact, this system has an interest in locking up as many people as possible (despite the fact that the violent crime rate has been falling for decades–see the Prison Policy Initiative’s website for a multitude of data).

Moreover, we are not just talking about individual voters making self-interested decisions.  The so-called Prison-Industrial Complex is by some accounts a $50 billion industry, and the companies that run private prisons have every incentive to expand their operations.  Like any other industry with an interest in political outcomes, operators of private prisons are able to influence voters and public officials to further their desired outcomes.  Here that means more prisoners and more prisons.

The outrageous racial, gender and class inequalities perpetuated by the prison system notwithstanding, this is just one of numerous situations where people have noticed a flaw in the election system and used it to put their thumb on the scale of political power to accomplish ends that benefit them but incur costs on society.  Yet, the solution to this electoral loophole would be simple: count prisoners as residents of their own communities, not their prison cells.

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Policy Viewpoints

The beginning of the end for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

It was reported this past Tuesday that Dan Choi, a gay national guardsman who has become one of the most public faces of the movement to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, has been allowed to return to his unit. Choi revealed his sexual orientation on The Rachel Maddow Show in March and was subsequently recommended for a dishonorable discharge.   In June,  a panel of officers recommended his discharge under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; a petition circulated by Courage Campaign opposing his dismissal was signed by over 162,000 people.  Talking Points Memo spoke to Sue Fulton, a member of Knights Out, an organization of gay West Point Graduates, who pointed out that while Choi’s discharge is pending, his commanding officer can decide whether or not he should remain with his unit.

Fulton surmises that the commanding officer invited Choi back because, like many observers, he had come to believe that DADT may well be repealed, and therefore that Choi might not ultimately be discharged. “I would view it as a recognition by his unit that Dan’s discharge may, after all, NOT be confirmed by the Army,” she said.

Fulton stressed, though, that it’s unlikely that the decision was made by anyone higher in the chain of command. “National Guard commanders have wide latitude in terms of their units,” she said. “This is not a change in Army policy, nor any action from ‘higher headquarters’ that we are aware of.”

This may simply be one isolated–albeit highly publicized–decision on the part of an individual Guard commander, but its implications are not hard to divine.  The president expressed unqualified support for the repeal of DADT before a joint session of congress during his State of the Union, and on February 2, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought gays and lesbian should be allowed to serve openly, saying that “no matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”  It appears that we are closer than we’ve ever been to allowing gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly and honorably in the armed forces.

Regardless of moral arguments either way, (and according to recent polling, those arguments are becoming more and more one-sided as support for gays serving in the military has burgeoned since DADT was enacted), prohibiting gays from serving openly and discharging them if they are up front about their sexual preference is bad public policy.  According to the DADT issue page at the Center for American Progress, over 13,000 military personnel have been discharged since it was enacted, costing taxpayers $363.8 million.  In addition to the folly of turning away willing enlistees while the armed forces employ stop-loss measures to keep sufficient numbers of “boots on the ground,” this policy has also resulted in the dismissal of over 800 highly trained “mission critical” personnel.  This includes “59 gay Arabic linguists and nine gay Farsi linguists in the last five years,” including Lieutenant Choi.  Moreover, 32 other countries have allowed gays to serve with no major problems.  From a policy standpoint, this is a no-brainer.

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Events

Daniel Hallin to Speak on Media Systems and Health Reporting

Daniel Hallin, professor and chair of Communication at the University of California, San Diego will present talks on February 23 and 24 as part of the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Mellon-funded Grants Workshop Speaker Series.  Hallin is an expert on political communication and the role of the news media in democracies.  The talks are co-sponsored by the Center for Communication and Sustainable Social Change, the Center for the Study of Communication, and the Department of Communication.

Hallin’s first talk, “Comparing Media Systems: Beyond the Western World,” will be at 4 p.m. on February 23, and his second talk, “Health and the Public Sphere: The Politicization of Health Reporting, 1960s-2000s,” will be at 12 p.m. on February 24.  Both talks are in the Campus Center Room 803.

Hallin’s talk on media systems will extend the analysis presented in his 2004 book with Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics.  In that work, the authors focused on democracies in Western Europe and North America to determine the influence of different political systems on the media and, in turn, the sway of the media on politics.  Hallin’s talk at UMass will focus on his current comparative research, which draws on data from Latin America and other non-Western regions of the world.

Hallin’s talk on health reporting will focus on changes in newspaper coverage of medicine and public health over five decades, based on a content analysis of articles from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.  His analysis, conducted with Charles Briggs, suggests a complex pattern that includes a growing emphasis on controversy in health reporting and a more critical stance toward medical authorities—a move toward a “public sphere model” in which recipients of health information are conceived as citizens or policymakers (as opposed to, for example, patients or consumers).

Daniel Hallin has written widely on media and politics, including war coverage, television news “soundbites,” and the history of American journalism.  His books include The “Uncensored War”:  The Media and Vietnam and We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere.

While at UMass, Hallin will also mentor Assistant Professor of Communication Emily West, who is developing a grant proposal for support of her research on consumer subjectivity in health care.

Hallin’s visit is also sponsored by the UMass Amherst Office of Faculty Development’s Mutual Mentoring Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Both talks are free and open to the public.

Categories
Student news

Professional Development Students Travel to Washington D.C.

The Center for Public Policy and Administration held its first annual Professional Development Seminar in Washington D.C. this January. Students met with alumni and public sector professionals from the Department of Energy, World Bank, Congressional Budget Office, Department of Labor, Government Accountability Office, Pew Charitable Trusts, and Congressman John Olver’s office over the course of two days. Throughout meetings, networking events, and luncheons, students learned more about the opportunities available to CPPA grads.
 
Both students and alumni had a great time and are all looking forward to another Professional Development Seminar in Washington D.C. in 2011.
     
   
Categories
Events

Prudence Carter to Speak on School Desegregation in South Africa and the U.S.

carterPrudence Carter of Stanford University will speak on “The Paradox of Opportunity: Race, Class, Culture, and Boundaries in South African and U.S. Schools” on Tuesday, February 2 at 12:30 p.m. in Thompson 620. The talk is part of the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Mellon?funded Grants Workshop Speaker Series and is co?sponsored by the Department of Sociology at UMass.

 

Carter is Associate Professor in the School of Education and (by courtesy) the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. She also co?directs the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) and is the award?winning author of Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White.

Drawing on four years of ethnographic, interview, and survey research in schools across the United States and South Africa, Carter will discuss the contradictions inherent in desegregation policies that focus primarily on spatial proximity and shared academic resources without regard for sociocultural practices and ideological structures within schools. The implications of her findings are important not only for policymakers in the U.S., but also for school leaders in South Africa who are currently drawing on over four decades of American experience with racial desegregation to redress educational and social disenfranchisement in their country.

While at UMass, Carter will also mentor Assistant Professor of Sociology Melissa Wooten, who is developing a grant proposal for support of her research on school referrals of children to after?school academic and cultural programs.

All CPPA talks are free and open to the public. Brownbag lunches are welcome.

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Student news

Policy and Administration Graduate Council (PAGC)

Established by the class of 2010, the Policy and Administration Graduate Council  (PAGC) provides avenues that help MPPA students become part of a coherent and integrated community that works and plays together. Specifically, PAGC provides social, public service, academic and professional development events that promote community and individual growth.

In order to foster community and social cohesion, PAGC hosts social events including outings to local restaurants, pub trivia nights, hikes in the nearby mountains (or “hills” to our west coast friends), intramural sports teams, and annual BBQ-picnics.

Graduate school can keep students very busy: even the most service-oriented student may feel like there is little time for individual volunteering.  PAGC organizes community service events so that MPPA students can maintain their dedication to public service while completing graduate work.  Last year, for example, a large PAGC group participated in a local charitable fun run—the “Hot Chocolate Run” in Northampton—and will sponsor a group again this December.  A PAGC group also volunteered with Tapestry Health (a local public health non-profit), tabling in the UMass Student Union and volunteering at their office in nearby Greenfield to sign up individuals for Massachusetts’s new public insurance program (MassHealth).

CPPA and the MPPA program provide opportunities for professional development and academic engagement  .  PAGC supplements these by providing experience and knowledge to students that might fall outside the structured curriculum and department-sponsored programs. Last year’s PAGC professional development events included hosting a speaker from the E.U., co-sponsoring seminars in public speaking skills, and participation in the UMass etiquette dinner.

PAGC provides students additional opportunities to engage with the CPPA community.  It also provides an organized venue for graduate students to play a leadership role in the department and in the University as a whole.

-Anna Tomaskovic-Devey, President, Policy and Administration Graduate Council

Categories
Science, technology & society

Fountain Reappointed to World Economic Forum’s Future of Government Council

JaneFountainPhoto

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 for a second year to the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.

The Global Agenda Councils are continuing efforts to develop proposals to address key challenges in over 70 areas of world affairs. The information and recommendations developed in the Councils provide the central ideas and proposals presented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Fountain is one of fourteen expertise invited to serve on this council. Council members will meet at the Second Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on 7-9 November 2009.

For more information about Fountain’s research and the National Center for Digital Government, visit the Center’s website at www.ncdg.org

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Events

“How to Make Friends and Influence Policy”

How to Make Friends and Influence Policy
How to Make Friends and Influence Policy

The UMass Public Engagement Project (PEP) held another great event on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.  Approximately 25 faculty, students and staff gathered in the Campus Center to hear Chris Hellman and Cheryl L. Dukes talk about “How to Make Friends and Influence Policy:  Working with State and Federal Policymakers.”

Chris Hellman is the Director of Research at the National Priorities Project (NPP), a nonprofit based in Northampton, MA, that works to make the public aware of federal spending and policy priorities.  Chris visits frequently with policymakers and analysts in Washington, D.C., especially those at the Departments of Defense and State, about U.S. security policy and spending.  He also spent 10 years as a Congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.

Cheryl L. Dukes is Associate Director of State Government Relations at UMass Amherst.  She regularly works with state legislators on university issues, including the annual budget process, and assists with UMass Amherst’s legislative agenda, advocacy on behalf of campus priorities, and efforts by faculty, students, parents and alumni to connect with state policymakers.

Both Chris and Cheryl stressed the importance of recognizing that “all politics is local.”   This has important implications when considering how one’s scholarship can make a difference in the world.

Chris noted that although testifying before Congress can be prestigious for faculty and their institutions, it can sometimes serve as validation for policy perspectives that are already formed.  Faculty research can make an authentic difference, though, when Congressional staff are still searching for data or analysis to craft effective legislation.  Connecting with local or regional NGOs who work on issues related to one’s research—but who also have connections at the national level—can be a good strategy for getting on the federal radar.

Cheryl affirmed the importance of networking at the local and regional level, and offered numerous strategies for becoming more informed about and involved in state politics.  Her website, UMass Amherst Advocacy, provides links to a range of useful resources, including bills that have been filed before the General Court (aka the Massachusetts state legislature) and legislator committee assignments.  She reminded the audience that Massachusetts is one of the few states to allow its citizens (working through one’s local representative or senator) to file new legislation with the Court.  Written testimony or attendance at public hearings on bills is also a good way to make policymakers aware of one’s data or research.

Chris and Cheryl both confirmed the importance of “messaging”—making your research relevant to lawmakers through writing that is accessible, brief, concise, and direct.  Chris offered a fact sheet produced by UMass Amherst faculty member Robert Pollin and PERI Research Fellow Heidi Garrett-Peltier on the employment impact of military expenditures as a good example.

PEP is jointly sponsored by CPPA, the Center for Research on Families, the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program, and the Department of Sociology at UMass Amherst.  Watch for new PEP events and the debut of a website devoted to public engagement resources in the spring of 2010.

Categories
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.