Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, moderated a session on New Media and the Future of Government for journalists, business executives, government officials, and NGO leaders at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Friday.
Participation in the annual meeting is by invitation only and limited to the chief executives of the world’s leading businesses, G20 politicians, the heads of major international organizations, chairs of the Global Agenda Councils, and the top representatives, journalists and entrepreneurs from around the globe. Professor Fountain was one of approximately sixty women world-wide invited to the Forum.
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, known to many as simply “Davos,” provides leaders with an unrivaled platform to shape the global agenda. Professor Fountain’s session explored transparency, innovation, and security in the information age and addressed power shifts, job loss and creation, and diplomacy in light of recent advances like Ushahidi and recent controversies like the leak of sensitive data through WikiLeaks. The Global Advisory Council on the Future of Government, which professor Fountain chairs, produced a discussion paper exploring these and similar topics in more detail. The paper will be available online after the annual meeting.
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.