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Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies
Using Visual Media To Empower Citizen Scientists: A Case Study Of The Outsmart App, Megan E. Kierstead
Using Visual Media To Empower Citizen Scientists: A Case Study Of The Outsmart App, Megan E. Kierstead
Masters Theses
To be successful citizen science projects need to do two key things: (1) they need to meaningfully engage the public and they must also provide people with the tools, expertise, and/or training needed to participate in rigorous research that can be used by the scientific community. In some ways, these requirements are potentially at odds. Emphasis on rigor and expertise risks excluding members of the public who do not feel qualified to participate in esoteric or technically difficult scientific research. Conversely, projects that eschew rigorous methods in favor of wider participation might lead to bad data that cannot be used …
Reflections On The Fog Of (Cyber) War, Diego Rafael Canabarro, Thiago Borne
Reflections On The Fog Of (Cyber) War, Diego Rafael Canabarro, Thiago Borne
National Center for Digital Government
No abstract provided.
Brazil And The Fog Of (Cyber) War, Diego Rafael Canabarro, Thiago Borne
Brazil And The Fog Of (Cyber) War, Diego Rafael Canabarro, Thiago Borne
National Center for Digital Government
No abstract provided.
Mapping “Diversity Of Participation” In Networked Media Environments, Martha Fuentes Bautista
Mapping “Diversity Of Participation” In Networked Media Environments, Martha Fuentes Bautista
National Center for Digital Government
In the United States the transition to an increasingly digital communication environment under pro-market policies has challenged traditional formulations of media diversity and localism regulation centered on content origination requirements and media ownership. Building on an overview of the participatory development and media policy literatures, this paper argues for a participatory community development approach to the redefinition of these public interest policies in networked scenarios. Asking who is participating in what, and for whose benefit, I propose a diversity matrix of various modalities of community participation in key public service functions of digital information organizations. The paper discusses …
Bringing Institutions Back In To Strategic Management: The Politics Of Digitally Mediated Institutional Change, Jane E. Fountain
Bringing Institutions Back In To Strategic Management: The Politics Of Digitally Mediated Institutional Change, Jane E. Fountain
National Center for Digital Government
No abstract provided.
The Office For Harmonization In The Internal Market: Creating A 21st Century Public Agency, Jane Fountain, Raquel Galindo-Dorado, Jeffrey Rothschild
The Office For Harmonization In The Internal Market: Creating A 21st Century Public Agency, Jane Fountain, Raquel Galindo-Dorado, Jeffrey Rothschild
National Center for Digital Government
(first paragraph) President Wubbo de Boer and his department directors, his top management team, prepared for critical meetings of the Administrative Board and the Budget Committee in the winter of 2010. The European Union’s trademark and design registration agency in Alicante, Spain, grandly named the Office of Harmonization for the Internal Market (Trade Mark and Design) (OHIM), had exceeded all expectations for the establishment of the Community trade mark (CTM) and the Registered Community design (RCD). The new agency also could be proud of impressive achievements in productivity and transparency since it began registering trademarks in 1996. Through productivity gains, …
Oficina De Armonización Del Mercado Interior: La Creación De Un Organismo Público Para El Siglo Xxi, Jane Fountain, Raquel Galindo-Dorado, Jeffrey Rothschild
Oficina De Armonización Del Mercado Interior: La Creación De Un Organismo Público Para El Siglo Xxi, Jane Fountain, Raquel Galindo-Dorado, Jeffrey Rothschild
National Center for Digital Government
(primer párrafo) En el invierno de 2010, el presidente Wubbo de Boer, en compañía de sus directores de departamento y de su equipo de alta dirección, preparaba las cruciales reuniones del Consejo de Administración y del Comité Presupuestario. La oficina de registro de marcas, dibujos y modelos de la Unión Europea, con sede en Alicante, España, pomposamente denominada Oficina de Armonización del Mercado Interior (Marcas, Dibujos y Modelos) (OAMI), había superado todas las expectativas generadas por la creación de la marca comunitaria (MC) y los dibujos o modelos comunitarios registrados (DMCR). El nuevo organismo también podía jactarse de los impresionantes …
Successful And Abandoned Sourceforge.Net Projects In The Initiation Stage, Charles Schweik
Successful And Abandoned Sourceforge.Net Projects In The Initiation Stage, Charles Schweik
National Center for Digital Government
[first paragraph] Chapter 6 provided an open source project success and abandonment dependent variable. Chapter 7 described data available in the Sourceforge.net repository and linked these data to various independent variable concepts and hypotheses presented in the theoretical part of this book. Chapter 7 also described the Classification Tree and Random Forest statistical approaches we use in this and the following chapter. This chapter presents the results of the Classification Tree analysis for successful and abandoned projects in the Initiation Stage, which in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.2), we defined as the period before and up to the time when a …
The Dependent Variable: Defining Open Source "Success" And "Abandonment" Using Sourceforge.Net Data, Charles Schweik
The Dependent Variable: Defining Open Source "Success" And "Abandonment" Using Sourceforge.Net Data, Charles Schweik
National Center for Digital Government
[first paragraph] From the very beginning of this research project, we understood that we needed to define what success meant in open source so that we could use that definition to create a dependent variable for our empirical studies. Does success mean a project has developed high quality software, or does it mean that the software is widely used? How might extremely valuable software that is used by only a few people, such as software for charting parts of the human genome, fit into this definition? In this chapter, we establish a robust success and abandonment measure that satisfies these …
Web 2.0 In The Process Of E-Participation: The Case Of Organizing For America And The Obama Administration, Aysu Kes-Erkul, R. Erdem Erkul
Web 2.0 In The Process Of E-Participation: The Case Of Organizing For America And The Obama Administration, Aysu Kes-Erkul, R. Erdem Erkul
National Center for Digital Government
The presidential campaign of Barack Obama during the 2008 elections sparked new discussion about the public engagement issue in the political processes. The campaign used Web 2.0 tools intensively to reach the general public and seek support and collect feedback from voters. In this paper, we analyze the major website of this project, “Organizing for America” (OFA) from the perspective of e-participation, which is a concept that include all the processes of public involvement via information and communication technologies.
Information & Communication Technologies And Digital Government: The Turkish Case, Turhan Mentes
Information & Communication Technologies And Digital Government: The Turkish Case, Turhan Mentes
National Center for Digital Government
The technological innovations of the last decades have opened the doors to a new and different world for businesses and governments. As access to the Internet penetrates more populations each day, ICTs continue to shape societies all over the world. This presentation will explore the development of ICTs and e-government in Turkey. It will include significant figures and statistics about e-government in Turkey and discuss the social consequences of such developments.
The Open Source Software Ecosystem, Charles M. Schweik
The Open Source Software Ecosystem, Charles M. Schweik
National Center for Digital Government
[first paragraph] Open source research in the late 1990s and early 2000's described open source development projects as all-volunteer endeavors without the existence of monetary incentives (Chakravarty, Haruvy and Wu, 2007), and relatively recent empirical studies (Ghosh, 2005; Wolf {{243}}) confirm that a sizable percentage of open source developers are indeed volunteers.1 Open source development projects involving more than one developer were seen to follow a “hacker ethic” (Himanen, 2000; von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003) where individuals freely give away and exchange software they had written so that it could be modified and built upon, with an expectation of …
E-Government And Inter-Organizational Collaboration In Mexico: Survey Results, Luis F. Luna-Reyes, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
E-Government And Inter-Organizational Collaboration In Mexico: Survey Results, Luis F. Luna-Reyes, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
National Center for Digital Government
From executive summary: This document summarizes the responses to questionnaires completed by participants from inter-organizational information technology (IT) projects in the Mexican federal government. The questionnaire was undertaken as part of a research project on e-government and inter-organizational collaboration funded by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) and conducted jointly by researchers from the Business School of the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, México, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City, and the National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The responses reflect the opinions of 282 government officials …
Open Source Software Collaboration: Foundational Concepts And An Empirical Analysis, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English, Sandra Haire
Open Source Software Collaboration: Foundational Concepts And An Empirical Analysis, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English, Sandra Haire
National Center for Digital Government
This paper has three primary goals. First, we provide an overview on some foundational concepts – “peer-production,” “user-centric innovation,” “crowdsourcing,” “task granularity,” and yes, open source and open content – for they are key elements of Internet-based collaboration we see today. Second, through this discussion on foundational concepts, we hope to make it clear why people interested in collaborative public management and administration should care about open source and open source-like collaboration. After this argument is made, we provide a very condensed summary of where we are to date on open source collaboration research. The goal of that research is …
The New Middle-Class, Technology And Modernity In Seelampur, Sreela Sarkar
The New Middle-Class, Technology And Modernity In Seelampur, Sreela Sarkar
National Center for Digital Government
From introduction: My paper studies a globally acclaimed experiment in computer literacy and cultural capital in Seelampur, located on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh state border. In late 2003, Datamation, a prominent private, Delhi based Information Technology firm, with partial funding from UNESCO and the Delhi state government, established computer literacy and e-commerce development projects in Zaffarabad in Seelampur. Seelampur is a diverse community but like the rest of the area, Zaffarabad is largely a settlement of informal working class Muslims. State violence and dominant middle-class interests have historically colluded to create Seelampur. During the National Emergency years in 1975-1977, residents of …
Brooks' Versus Linus' Law: An Empirical Test Of Open Source Projects, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English
Brooks' Versus Linus' Law: An Empirical Test Of Open Source Projects, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English
National Center for Digital Government
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects are Internet-based collaborations consisting of volunteers and paid professionals who come together to create computer software...
Reflections Of An Online Geographic Information Systems Course Based On Open Source Software, Charles M. Schweik, Maria Fernandez, Michael P. Hamel, Prakash Kashwan, Quentin Lewis, Alexander Stepanov
Reflections Of An Online Geographic Information Systems Course Based On Open Source Software, Charles M. Schweik, Maria Fernandez, Michael P. Hamel, Prakash Kashwan, Quentin Lewis, Alexander Stepanov
National Center for Digital Government
This SSCORE report summarizes our experience offering an online introductory course on Geographic Information Systems that utilizes available free/libre and open source software (FOSS). Two primary objectives were to (1) reach students in developing countries, and (2) to help move forward the development of an “open content” GIS curriculum as part of the “Open Source Geospatial Foundation” (OSGeo.org) educational effort. Course design, key software (QGIS, GRASS, PostGresql/PostGIS) and online delivery methods are described. Results and factors leading to a low course completion rate and discussed. Contributing factors include: (1) a for-credit versus no-credit decision; and (2) technical issues. Recommendations for …
Better Public Services For Growth And Jobs, Jane E. Fountain
Better Public Services For Growth And Jobs, Jane E. Fountain
National Center for Digital Government
No abstract provided.
Increasing Social Capital For Disaster Response Through Social Networking Services (Sns) In Japanese Local Governments, Alexander Schellong
Increasing Social Capital For Disaster Response Through Social Networking Services (Sns) In Japanese Local Governments, Alexander Schellong
National Center for Digital Government
Researchers have argued that social networks within a community have positive effects on people’s behavior in the four stages of disaster. The Japanese government is testing Social Networking Service (SNS) at the municipal level with the intention to improve community building, democratic processes and disaster management. This paper presents results from two case studies of local SNS in Yatsushiro city, Kumamoto prefecture and Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture. While the Yatsushiro’s solution seems to be sustainable, Nagaoka’s SNS is in decline. Both have to compete with popular SNS like Mixi and lack critical mass. Based on the reviewed literature I discuss …
Open-Source Collaboration In The Public Sector: The Need For Leadership And Value, Michael P. Hamel
Open-Source Collaboration In The Public Sector: The Need For Leadership And Value, Michael P. Hamel
National Center for Digital Government
From executive summary: The “open-source” movement in information technology is largely based on the innovative licensing schemes that encourage collaboration and sharing and promise reduced cost of ownership, customizable software and the ability to extract data in a usable format. Government organizations are becoming increasingly intolerant of the forced migrations (upgrades) and closed data standards (or incompatible data standards) that typically come with the use of proprietary software. To combat the problems of interoperability and cost, governments around the globe are beginning to consider, and in some cases, even require the use of open-source software (Hahn, 2002; Wong, 2004).
Tragedy Of The Foss Commons? Investigating The Institutional Designs Of Free/Libre And Open Source Software Projects, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English
Tragedy Of The Foss Commons? Investigating The Institutional Designs Of Free/Libre And Open Source Software Projects, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English
National Center for Digital Government
Free/Libre and Open Source Software projects (FOSS) are a form of Internetbased commons. Since 1968, when Garrett Hardin published his famous article “Tragedy of the Commons” in the journal Science, there has been significant interest in understanding how to manage commons appropriately, particularly in environmental fields. An important distinction between natural resource commons and FOSS commons is that the “tragedy” to be avoided in natural resources is overharvesting and the potential destruction of the resource. In FOSS commons the “tragedy” to be avoided is project abandonment and a “dead” project. Institutions – defined as informal norms, more formalized rules, and …
Identifying Success And Tragedy Of Floss Commons: A Preliminary Classification Of Sourceforge.Net Projects, Robert English, Charles M. Schweik
Identifying Success And Tragedy Of Floss Commons: A Preliminary Classification Of Sourceforge.Net Projects, Robert English, Charles M. Schweik
National Center for Digital Government
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects are a form of commons where individuals work collectively to produce software that is a public, rather than a private, good. The famous phrase “Tragedy of the Commons” describes a situation where a natural resource commons, such as a pasture, or a water supply, gets depleted because of overuse. The tragedy in FLOSS commons is distinctly different -- it occurs when collective action ceases before a software product is produced or reaches its full potential. This paper builds on previous work about defining success in FLOSS projects by taking a collective action perspective. …
The Digital Divide Metaphor: Understanding Paths To It Literacy, Enrico Ferro, Natalie C. Helbig, J. Ramon Gil-Garci
The Digital Divide Metaphor: Understanding Paths To It Literacy, Enrico Ferro, Natalie C. Helbig, J. Ramon Gil-Garci
National Center for Digital Government
Not having access or having a disadvantaged access to information, in an information-based society may be considered as a handicap (Compaine, 2001). In the last two decades scholars have gradually refined the conceptualization of digital divide, moving from a dichotomous model mainly based on access to a multidimensional model accounting for differences in usage levels and perspectives. While models became more complex, research continued to mainly focus on deepening the understanding of demographic and socioeconomic differences between adopters and non-adopters. In doing so, the process of basic IT skills acquisition has been largely overlooked. This paper presents a metaphorical interpretation …
Enacting Technology In Networked Governance: Developmental Processes Of Cross-Agency Arrangements, Jane E. Fountain
Enacting Technology In Networked Governance: Developmental Processes Of Cross-Agency Arrangements, Jane E. Fountain
National Center for Digital Government
This paper discusses the technology enactment framework, an analytical framework to guide exploration and examination of information-based change in governments.1 The original technology enactment framework is extended in this paper to delineate the distinctive roles played by key actors in technology enactment. I then examine institutional change in government by drawing from current initiatives in the U.S. federal government to build cross-agency relationships and systems. The U.S. government is one of the first central states to undertake not only back office integration within the government but also integration of systems and processes across agencies. For this reason its experience during …
Icts And Political Accountability: An Assessment Of The Impact Of Digitization In Government On Political Accountability In Connecticut, Massachusetts And New York State, Albert Meijer
National Center for Digital Government
This report presents a first analysis of the results of empirical research into the impact of digitization on political accountability in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York State. The report focuses on presenting the empirical findings and these data still require further analysis.
Challenges To Organizational Change: Multi-Level Integrated Information Structures (Miis), Jane E. Fountain
Challenges To Organizational Change: Multi-Level Integrated Information Structures (Miis), Jane E. Fountain
National Center for Digital Government
From introduction: Governments are extraordinary information creators, users, and disseminators. I-government focuses attention on the flow and structuring of information within government (Mayer-Schoenberger and Lazer, this volume). Government actors engage in knowledge work, specifically, in the creation, sharing, and communication of information. They design and redesign processes by which information flows according to legislative mandate, organizational practice and public need. Recently, they have sought to rethink information flows in order to leverage benefits from information and communication technologies. When public sector actors seek to change these information flows at any appreciable level of complexity, they inevitably engage in complex organizational …
Exploring E-Government Evolution: The Influence Of Systems Of Rules On Organizational Action, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Ignacio J. Martinez-Moyano
Exploring E-Government Evolution: The Influence Of Systems Of Rules On Organizational Action, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Ignacio J. Martinez-Moyano
National Center for Digital Government
In general terms, e-government can be defined as the use of information and communication technologies in government settings. However, it is neither a homogeneous nor a static phenomenon. In recent years, empirical studies have identified two interesting dynamics in e-government evolution. First, e-government has evolved from its initial presence on the Internet to a more transactional and integrated approach. Second, at the aggregate level and as a general trend, national governments have started adding technological sophistication and have been followed by state and local governments. This paper attempts to explain these two dynamics in the evolution of e-government as a …
Is Necessity The Mother Of Innovation? The Adoption And Use Of Web Technologies Among Congressional Offices, Kevin M. Esterling, David M.J. Lazer, Michael Neblo
Is Necessity The Mother Of Innovation? The Adoption And Use Of Web Technologies Among Congressional Offices, Kevin M. Esterling, David M.J. Lazer, Michael Neblo
National Center for Digital Government
From first paragraph: Communication between legislator and constituents is fundamental to effective democratic representation, and devising the institutional means for citizen/legislator communication stands as one of the core and persistent problems in the practice of democracy. A legislator needs information about the preferences, ideals, norms, and beliefs of her constituents in order to do her job well. Similarly, citizens need information about the actions and decisions of their representative in order to maintain appropriate accountability. But as national problems become more complex, and as the political process grows more and more dominated by experts and organized groups, it is becoming …
Race, Place, And Information Technology, Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert
Race, Place, And Information Technology, Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert
National Center for Digital Government
What role does environment play in influencing information technology access and skills – over and above individual characteristics such as income, education, race, and ethnicity? One of the puzzles that emerged from our recent research on the “digital divide” was that African-Americans, and to a lesser extent, Latinos, had more positive attitudes toward information technology than similarly-situated whites. And yet, African-Americans and Latinos are less likely to have information technology access and skills, even when controlling for other factors such as income and education (Mossberger, Tolbert and Stansbury 2003). The research presented in this paper takes a first step toward …
E-Government Cross-Agency And Intergovernmental Initiatives Research Project: Web Survey Results, Jane E. Fountain, Robin Mckinnon, Eunyun Park
E-Government Cross-Agency And Intergovernmental Initiatives Research Project: Web Survey Results, Jane E. Fountain, Robin Mckinnon, Eunyun Park
National Center for Digital Government
One of the central challenges of E-Government is organizational and institutional change. Professor Jane E. Fountain, the founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Government at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and her research team are currently continuing a practical research program on the development of crossagency collaboration and integration using information technologies. The project is designed to describe and explain critical success factors in successful E-Government cross-agency collaborative projects. The study should contribute significant management, economic and policy benefits as a result of better understanding how to structure conditions for success in cross-agency initiatives that …