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The National Center for Digital Government (NCDG) was established in 2002 with support from the National Science Foundation. NCDG is 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. The goal of NCDG is to apply and extend the social sciences for research at the intersection of governance, institutions and information technologies. For the latest information about NCDG, please visit our website.
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Publication Information, Institutions and Governance: Advancing a Basic Social Science Research Program for Digital Government(2003-01-01) Fountain, JaneFrom the Executive Summary: 'To provide guidance and discussion meant to support the development of the Digital Government Program to include research in the social and applied social sciences, more than 30 experts gathered at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge from May 30 to June 1, 2002 for a national workshop to aid in the development of a broadly-based, multidisciplinary social science research agenda for digital government. In spite of significant innovations in information and communication technologies, digital government remains at an early stage of implementation. Moreover, the implications of IT for the future of government are as yet dimly perceived notwithstanding a stream of speculation and informed commentary on the future of democracy and governance.'Publication Bringing Institutions Back In to Strategic Management: The Politics of Digitally Mediated Institutional Change(2011-01-01) Fountain, Jane E.Publication Bureaucratic Reform and E-Government in the United States: An Institutional Perspective(2007-09-18) Fountain, JaneTechnology enactment, an analytical framework that focuses on the processes by which new information and communication technologies come to be used by organizational actors, is distinctly institutional in orientation. An institutional perspective provides a challenge to researchers to integrate attention to structure, politics and policy into studies of e-government. It also invites attention to the roles and relationships of formal and informal institutions. Formal institutions – laws, regulations, budget processes, and other governmental procedures – are central to legitimation and shaping incentives for the use of ICT as an integral and inseparable set of elements in the administrative state. Informal institutions – networks, norms and trust – are equally influential. Challenges in the development of e-government stem from core issues of liberty, freedom, participation and other central elements of democracy. Structurally, however, such challenges may be viewed through an institutional lens in terms of the adequacy of formal and informal institutions to support e-government. An institutional perspective, drawing primarily from economic sociology as well as from the institutional turn in economics, provides a path to deepening studies of information and communication technologies in government in ways that can illuminate state development and capacity. In addition, this chapter describes key institutional developments in e-government during two presidential administrations in the United States as well as key developments in state and local U.S. government.Publication Open Source Collaboration: Two Cases in the US Public Sector(2009-01-01) Schweik, Charles M; Hamel, Michael PGlobally, there is an emergence of open source consortia focused on the sharing of resources and code, and a desire to promote an open source approach generally. In this paper, we describe our findings from interviews with participants working in two relatively new consortia in the government sector: the Government Open Code Collaborative or GOCC, and the Open Source Software Institute or OSSI. For each case we consider six major questions: (1) How and why did these collaborative efforts begin? (2) What are their motivations? (3) How are these collaborative efforts governed? (4) What communication and collaborative infrastructure do they utilize? (5) What software do they focus on? and, (6) What is their current status? Our findings suggest that incentives, membership structures, stable paid staff, concentrated focus and attention to the creation and delivery of “value” to participating organizations are important factors leading to successful open source consortia.Publication Brazil and The Fog of (Cyber) War(2013-03-01) Rafael Canabarro, Diego; Borne, ThiagoPublication Reflections on the Fog of (Cyber) War(2013-03-01) Rafael Canabarro, Diego; Borne, ThiagoPublication Mapping “Diversity of Participation” In Networked Media Environments(2012-01-01) Fuentes Bautista, MarthaIn 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 the advantages of this approach in response to policy concerns about cultural diversity, digital inclusion and democratic governance of local information ecosystems.Publication Oficina de Armonización del Mercado Interior: La creación de un organismo público para el siglo XXI(2010-01-01) Fountain, Jane; Galindo-Dorado, Raquel; Rothschild, Jeffrey(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 progresos alcanzados en materia de productividad y de transparencia desde que, en el año 1996, iniciase sus actividades de registro de las marcas. Entre 1996 y 2009, los incrementos de productividad habían permitido a la Agencia reducir en casi un 50 % las tasas abonadas por las empresas en concepto de de registro de las marcas, dibujos y modelos. Valiéndose de las innovadoras herramientas de comercio electrónico y de la información basada en Internet, los directivos y el personal de la OAMI se habían esforzado durante más de una década por modernizar y simplificar los procesos aplicados al examen y registro de las marcas y modelos, automatizando enteramente muchas fases del procedimiento. Habían puesto poderosas herramientas de información a disposición de sus «usuarios», término utilizado por la OAMI para designar a los particulares y a las empresas que interactúan con la Agencia, y también a disposición de los propios examinadores de la OAMI, con el fin de mejorar la eficiencia y fiabilidad en la toma de decisiones. Habían analizado el grado de satisfacción de los usuarios y trabajado codo a codo con ellos, a fin de elaborar parámetros de rendimiento y de niveles de servicio que a su vez sirviesen de acicate a la OAMI para mejorar permanentemente sus servicios en lo relativo a puntualidad, calidad y accesibilidad. Habían tenido que enfrentarse también con determinados comportamiento y pautas fuertemente arraigados entre los funcionarios de carrera, introduciendo elementos de flexibilidad como el teletrabajo en las actividades del personal de Alicante, y esforzándose por analizar rigurosamente los métodos operativos, con vistas a mejorar su productividad.Publication The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market: Creating a 21st Century Public Agency(2010-05-19) Fountain, Jane; Galindo-Dorado, Raquel; Rothschild, Jeffrey(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, the agency had reduced the fees companies paid to register trademarks and designs by about 50 percent between 1996 and 2009. Through innovative use of e-business tools and web-based information, for more than a decade OHIM managers and staff had worked to transform and simplify the processes used to examine and register trademarks and designs, completely automating many steps in these processes. They had provided powerful information tools for their “users,” OHIM’s term for the individuals and firms that interact with the agency, and for internal OHIM examiners to increase efficiency and reliability of decision making. They had surveyed users and worked closely with them to develop performance measures and service standards that would in turn challenge OHIM to continuously improve its service in terms of timeliness, quality and accessibility. They had even challenged deeply held attitudes and norms of the permanent civil service by building flexibilities including telework into workforce practices in Alicante and by efforts to rigorously examine working methods to improve productivity.Publication The Institutional Dimension of e-Government Promotion: A Comparative Study on Making ‘Business Reference Model (BRM)’ in the U.S. and Korea(2010-02-06) Eom, Seok-JinWhy do e-government initiatives which are commonly implemented to achieve similar policy goals produce different outcomes in different nations? To answer this question, this paper examines e-government policy structure, which has been regarded as one of the most important institutional arrangements for e-government promotion (European Commission, 2007; Park, 2006; OECD, 2005; Eifert and Puschel, 2004). Specifically, the legal framework, the managerial tools for coordination and control, and the organizational arrangements of the e-government policy structures of the Bush administration in the U.S. and of Roh administration in Korea are compared. Based on such a comparative analysis, this study demonstrates how different institutional arrangements of e-government policy structure influence the different outcomes of BRMs in the two nations.Publication The Dependent Variable: Defining Open Source "Success" and "Abandonment" Using Sourceforge.Net Data(2009-12-07) Schweik, Charles[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 conditions. We describe the process we went through to create a definition of open source success and abandonment, and how we used that definition to classify nearly all the projects hosted on Sourceforge.net (SF, as of October 2006) as either successful or abandoned.Publication Successful and Abandoned Sourceforge.Net Projects in the Initiation Stage(2009-12-07) Schweik, Charles[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 project completes a first release of its software. Readers are encouraged to review Chapter 6 (especially Table 6.1) for specifics on how we operationalized this definition as well as the other Initiation Stage dependent variable categories (e.g., Abandoned in Initiation, Indeterminate in Initiation).Publication The Open Source Software Ecosystem(2009-01-01) Schweik, Charles M[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 reciprocation. An early puzzle, of particular interest to economists, was why people would voluntarily contribute their ideas and time to these projects (Lerner and Tirole {{243}}. We'll focus on these fine-scale behavioral questions in Chapter 3, and will explain that there are clear reasons – such as distance learning, signaling, enjoyment, and “user-driven innovation” based on a need (von Hippel, 2005) – that motivate these volunteers to participate.Publication Information & Communication Technologies and Digital Government: The Turkish Case(2009-09-24) Mentes, TurhanThe 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.Publication Web 2.0 in the Process of e-participation: The Case of Organizing for America and the Obama Administration(2009-10-01) Kes-Erkul, Aysu; Erkul, R. ErdemThe 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.Publication Better public services for growth and jobs(2007-10-01) Fountain, Jane E.Publication The Digital Divide Metaphor: Understanding Paths to IT Literacy(2007-01-01) Ferro, Enrico; Helbig, Natalie C.; Gil-Garci, J. RamonNot 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 of the process of IT skills acquisition derived from empirical evidence. The analysis highlights the presence of three distinct IT skills acquisition approaches, as well as the key role of self-learning. These preliminary results represent a useful starting point for the design of more effective and sophisticated inclusion policies.Publication Identifying Success and Tragedy of FLOSS Commons: A Preliminary Classification of Sourceforge.net Projects(2007-02-01) English, Robert; Schweik, Charles M.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. We first report the results of interviews with FLOSS developers regarding our ideas about success and failure in FLOSS projects. Building on those interviews and previous work, we then describe our criteria for defining success/tragedy in FLOSS commons. Finally, we discuss the results of a preliminary classification of nearly all projects hosted on Sourceforge.net as of August 2006. 1.Publication Open Source Software Collaboration: Foundational Concepts and an Empirical Analysis(2008-11-03) Schweik, Charles M.; English, Robert; Haire, SandraThis 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 to learn about the factors that lead to successful or abandoned collaborations in the open source domain, in part to help us understand how “open source-like” collaborations can be deployed in areas outside of software. We have a lot to cover. Let’s get right to it.Publication The New Middle-Class, Technology and Modernity in Seelampur(2008-04-01) Sarkar, SreelaFrom 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 Seelampur were given small plots of land in exchange for demolitions of their homes and forced sterilization at the same time that middle-class groups received tax breaks (Tarlo, 2003). Over the decades, the Delhi government has raided and razed homes and businesses in Seelampur, enforcing its policies on slum clearance and recently, its controversial environment laws on closure of several manufacturing industries that are an integral part of the local and national economy.