| dg.o2004 Marks 5 Years of Research Community's Growth Scholars and Partners Show off Diversity, Innovation as National Conference on Digital Government Research Convenes in Seattle By Karen Heyman For the DGRC
Its attendance count of more than 170 represents more than four times the size of the original, invitation-only conference held in 2000. Like the field itself, the conference has grown to include participants from a wide variety of academic disciplines. "I was the only social scientist at the first conference," remembered Sharon Dawes, Director of the Center for Technology in Government at SUNY-Albany, "I would look for people with whom I had something in common, like that we both came from New York." Now looking over a room filled not only with her fellow social scientists, but a range of researchers from fields as diverse as public policy, geography and computer modeling, Dawes said of the challenges ahead, "It is the most intractable problems that demand new ways of collaboration." The field has come so far in such a short time, that Yigal Arens, of USC's Information Sciences Institute, issued a public call for the creation of a Digital Government Society, which would take over the organizing of the annual conference and other community activities. Those interested in being part of a formation committee are asked to contact Arens directly. In another sign of its growing maturity, the field is also celebrating the launch of its first, dedicated journal. Co-editor-in-chief Donald Norris, Director of the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), says that selected papers from the conference will appear in the second issue, after having first passed the journal's own peer review process.
"As time has gone on we've tried to pay more attention to what happens to the result of the research after the research grant is over, so we've begun to some more technology transfer kinds of activities, such as training either government agency personnel or their subcontractors to take a technology and use it and maintain it," Brandt says. "We're really interested in having the research have a long-term lifespan, a longer term impact." In addition, says Brandt, "We're much more interested now in bringing together computer science researchers with social science researchers-to explore what are the long term impacts of information technologies on government, on issues like Internet voting, for example. I think that's where the program has the potential to have the greatest impact, because we're bringing together communities that don't generally work together." Although the NSF has a division of social, economic and behavioral research, it's typically not been funded as much as the rest of NSF, according to Brandt. "NSF has not done much in the way of funding people who study policy processes, people who are public administration kind of people, that's something completely fresh. We're trying to encourage that."
Most importantly, he suggests people contact him before investing the time in writing a grant, "I'm always willing to talk with people who have an idea. Give me a call, get in touch with me by email. I review pre-proposals or concepts and I will tell you if you need to strengthen it or if it's a good topic for the program or its not. Because of the heterogeneity of the program, typically as many as 20 or 25% of the proposals we get every year are not well targeted. They're wasting their time writing them, we're wasting our time reviewing them. So getting a dialog going earlier benefits everybody." Brandt acknowledges that pursuing an interdisciplinary research program can still be a challenge for junior faculty, under pressure to establish themselves in their own, traditional fields. He offers this encouragement: "We try to give more than the usual number of planning grants where I can make the decision myself without the peer review process." The grants are small, only on the order of fifty-thousand dollars, "The intention is to give junior faculty some relief by buying some of their time and letting them think about broader proposals."
The police had been alerted that someone in an online discussion forum had seemed suicidal. They were concerned enough to track down Rhodes - whose name was spelled with just one letter's difference from the name in an email address from the actual subject of their quest. E-government in action, indeed. And so, in the middle of the night, Rhodes taught the attentive local police about domain addressing. "That is the great connection you are making," he concluded, "You are intercepting government and research." One example is a lesson learned by the Social Security Administration: They had thought it a good idea to put personal earnings and benefits statements online. Of course, they had planned to secure the information-but it was only through public comments, largely gathered off their Web site, that they learned just how much the public distrusted the idea. The success here was digitally-enabled communication-a government agency that had turned its Web site into a two-way interaction, rather than just a unilateral agency notice board. But it is just the sort of cultural misunderstanding that led to the original, subsequently modified decision, of which all digital researchers must be aware, warns Rhodes. Whether working with agency partners, the general public, or international collaborators we must remember, he says, "A grasshopper can be a pest, good luck, or an appetizer, depending on what culture you're in."
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