Category: Research

World Social Science Forum panel on Transformation of Public Policy in the Digital Age

Seok-Jin Eom newSeok-Jin Eom, associate professor at Seoul National University and former NCDG fellow, joined Jane Fountain and international colleagues as part of an international panel titled “Transformation of Public Policy and Governance in the Digital Age,” at the World Social Science Forum, October 13-15, at the Palais des congrès de Montréal Canada. The conference theme was “social transformation in the digital age.”

The international panel was organized by the Korean Social Science Research Council and the Korean National Commission for UNESCO. It brought together scholars from several major countries to cast a critical look at public policy and governance, one of the important social transformations in the digital age, in a comparative setting. To this end, the KOSSREC invited internationally recognized scholars on the subject from four countries including China, Japan, Korea, and the USA.

The panel was coordinated by Yong-duck Jung, President of the Korean Social Science Research Council and Professor, Seoul National University. Invited scholars and their papers included:

Professors Seok-Jin Eom and Yong-duck Jung (Seoul National University), “Administrative Information Sharing and its Impacts on Governance in Korea”

Professor Hiroshi Shiratori (Hosei University), “Transformation of Public Policy and Governance in the Digital Age: The Case of Japan”

Professor Sun Yu (School of Government, Beijing Normal University) and Dang Shengcui, Fang Bin, and Zhao Qiuyan (China Academy of Social Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China), “Public Access to Administrative Information and Participatory Governance in the Digital Age: Findings from China’s Survey”

Professor Jane Fountain (National Center for Digital Government and University of Massachusetts Amherst) “Virtual Agencies: Cross-Agency Collaboration in the U.S. Federal Government”

The invited scholars presented their country experiences with an eye toward finding common themes cross-nationally. The panel discussion focused on the ways and the results in which digital technologies are being used for public policy development and innovation in governance. A key theme that emerged from the panel presentations and discussion is the centrality of cross-agency collaboration and its importance for innovation in government globally.

 

CEGOV’s director, Prof. Marco Cepik, visits the NCDG

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On April 17th, Professor Marco Cepik, director of the Center for International Studies on Government (CEGOV) of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil visited NCDG.
He was received by Prof. Jane Fountain and a fruitful meeting ensued.
Dr. Fountain and Dr. Cepik agreed on a research-oriented prospective agenda, which aims at institutionalizing the partnership between the two Centers. As a first step on that direction, NCDG and CEGOV will work on the proposal of a panel on the topic of ICT and the Global South, to be held in 2014 during an annual Political Science conference to be defined in the following months. It is expected that the event can yield the publication of a special issue in a journal from the field of Political Science.
NCDG and CEGOV will work in close cooperation in order to enable the interchange of researchers on a task-oriented basis for ongoing research projects at both ends. Both institutions will also work in order to pursue funding opportunities for joint research projects.
Prof. Fountain and Prof. Cepik agreed to conduct a pilot teaching experience from next on: they will organize a common course to be taught synchronically at UMass and at UFRGS over the Web.

New paper by Martha Fuentes Bautista: “Mapping ‘diversity of participation’ in networked media environments”

Department of Communication Professor and NCDG Faculty Affiliate Martha Fuentes Bautista has published a new working paper, Mapping ‘diversity of participation’ in networked media environments.  A lively discussion of extensions and applications of the framework proposed in her paper to other fields within STS was held by members of the NCDG and the UMass Workshop on the Knowledge Commons on Nov. 29, 2012, at 12:30 PM in the Gordon Hall STS conference room on the UMass Amherst campus.

New book: Internet Success by Charles Schweik and Robert English

Professor and NCDG Associate Director Charles Schweik and former NCDG research fellow Robert English have published Internet Success: A Study of Open-Source Software Commons (MIT Press, 2012). Nobel prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, wrote: “Charles Schweik and Robert English have written a book that illustrates, for scholars and Ph.D. students around the world, the challenge of undertaking careful research on the intellectual commons and then summarizing it in a responsible manner. The final chapter will be of substantial importance to anyone thinking of studying how individuals develop creative settings for jointly producing a common good. I strongly recommend this outstanding book.”

Visit MIT Press website.

World Economic Forum Future of Government report

Digital governance is one of the five key themes for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos this year. In Abu Dhabi, at the WEF Global Agenda Council Summit, interest in digital governance from several Global Agenda Councils was intense. This year, Jane Fountain is the Vice Chair of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. She chaired the Council last year and, with Council members, launched the report, “The Future of Government: Lessons Learned from around the World” at the WEF Europe and Central Asia Summit held in Vienna in June 2011abu_dhabi2.

The Internet and Islam – The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Philip Howard, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington has just published The Internet and Islam – The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. The book investigates the impact of digital technologies on civic life in countries with significant Muslim communities.  According to Howard,  “The book uses innovative comparative methods to look at how technologies like the mobile phone and internet have changed the very meaning of citizenship…[O]n the whole the prognosis is good:  in the last 15 years, technology diffusion trends have contributed to clear political outcomes, and digital media have become a key ingredient in the modern recipe for democratization.”  Read more from the publisher.

“Digital Origins” investigates the impact of digital technologies on civic life in countries with significant Muslim communities.  The book uses some innovative comparative methods to look at how technologies like the mobile phone and internet have changed the very meaning of citizenship.  There are chapters on state capacity, political parties, journalism and civil society.  There is also, as you might expect, a chapter on how new technologies make some dictators better dictators.  But on the whole the prognosis is good:  in the last 15 years, technology diffusion trends have contributed to clear political outcomes, and digital media have become a key ingredient in the modern recipe for democratization.

Oyedemi Received NCDG Grant and Fellowship

Toks Oyedemi, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has received a 2010 Student Research Grant from the National Center for Digital Government (NCDG).The award will help Oyedemi conduct doctoral field research on the pattern and quality of Internet access and the role of technology in social change in South Africa.

In addition to receiving the research grant, Oyedemi joins the Center as a Research Fellow for the 2010-2011 academic year. As a fellow, Oyedemi joins a team of international NCDG scholars exploring the impact of technology on local, state and federal governments around the world.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the NCDG seeks to build global research capacity, to advance practice, and to strengthen the network of researchers and practitioners engaged in building and using technology in government. NCDG Student Research Grants are designed to support student research programs at UMass Amherst that examine the intersection of information and communication technologies, policy, and government. More information about NCDG is available at www.ncdg.org.

Schweik, et al Create iPhone App to Save Oiled 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.