DGOnline Newsletter

Volume 29: October 2009

Welcome to dgOnline, the electronic newsletter of the Digital Government Society of North America. dgOnline is a monthly summary of news and events of interest to the DG community.  To submit material for inclusion in future issues, please send email to Meelis Kitsing at newsletter@dgsociety.org .

In this Issue:

• dg.o 2010
• Conferences and Calls for Papers
• Grant Opportunities and Announcements

dg.o 2010

Call for Papers: 11th International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o 2010)
Public Administration Online: Opportunities and Challenges
Puebla, Mexico (photo below)
Monday - Thursday May 17-20, 2010.
Home Page: http://www.dgo2010.org
General Inquiries: dgo2010@easychair.org
Social Network for dg.o community: http://dgo2009.crowdvine.com/
Submission web site: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=dgo2010

The Digital Government Society of North America (DGSNA), with major support from the US National Science Foundation, presents the 11th International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o 2010). The dg.o meetings are an established forum for the presentation, discussion and demonstration of interdisciplinary digital government research, technology innovation, and applications. Each year the conference combines: presentations of effective partnerships among government professionals, university researchers, relevant businesses, and NGOs, as well as grassroots citizen groups, to advance the practice of digital government and research on digital government as an interdisciplinary domain that lies at the intersections of computing research, social and behavioral science research, and the problems and missions of government.

The dg.o 2010 conference theme "Public Administration Online: Opportunities and Challenges" focuses on open government, information sharing, interoperability, distributed collaboration, and massive intelligence in government areas, as well as Web 2.0, and cloud computing. The theme encompasses issues related to the capabilities to be provided by such environments; user interactions and experiences with such online Digital Government resources and environments; and, the technical infrastructure  needed to support such environments. Topics in Web 2.0 technologies, online collaboration environments, user adoption and adaptation, and use of cloud computing to support such environments are all relevant and pose interesting scientific questions. At the same time, governments around the world are being confronted with incredible challenges in privacy and policy issues, even as there are trends and pressures to make these data accessible via more platforms, e.g. mobile devices. An additional important focus area of the conference is on policy issues related to the above topics.

The goal of this year's conference program is to encourage active discussions between practitioners and academics in order to provide insights into Digital Government issues leading to future innovations. In addition, we also welcome submissions from the broader domain of digital government research. More  specifically, we invite research papers, management, policy and case study papers, student research papers, on-going research posters, and live demonstrations that address the impact of public administration online, use of cloud computing, and effectiveness of social networks as transformative technologies for G2G, G2C, C2C, and G2B interactions. We particularly encourage submissions on interdisciplinary and crosscutting topics addressing social computing in the context of broad government challenges. We also encourage the submission of panels, 'birds-of-a-feather' discussions, and pre-conference tutorials and workshops.

Conferences and Calls for Papers

Call for Papers for the 10th European Conference on e-Government 2010
This is a call for papers for the 10th European Conference on e-Government which is being held at the University of Limerick, Ireland on the 17-18 June 2010. The call is open until 30 November 2009. The conference committee welcomes contributions on a wide range of topics using a range of scholarly approaches including theoretical and empirical papers employing qualitative, quantitative and critical methods. Action research, case studies and work-in-progress/posters are welcomed approaches. PhD Research, proposals for roundtable discussions, non-academic contributions and product demonstrations based on the main themes are also invited. A full call for papers, including how to submit can be found at http://academic-conferences.org/eceg/eceg2010/eceg10-call-papers.htm

Call for Papers: Politics of Open Source

The conference will take place on May 6-7, 2010, in Amherst, Massachusetts and features Clay Johnson (Sunlight Labs) as one of the daily keynote speakers. Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) has made significant advances, both technically and organizationally, since its emergence in the mid-1980s. Over the last decade, it has moved from a software development approach involving mostly volunteers to a more complex ecology where firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies and volunteers may be involved. Moreover, the production paradigm continues to expand to other areas of digital content (e.g., Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Connexions, etc.). In this conference we use the phrase “open source” to capture this broader phenomenon. The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of open source, broadly defined.

"Politics" in the conference title, can have many interpretations. Political issues closely tied to the free and open source software movement(s) include: national government policies related to the adoption of open source technologies or questions related to interoperability and open standards, software patents, vendor lock-in, and copyright. These are central themes we expect may be discussed in this forum. In this context, we welcome international submissions since differences in the political perspective appear in international contexts. However, topics related to how the concept of openness has led to various interpretations, adaptations, and applications of “open source” in other domains, and political issues that surround these broader innovations, are also welcome. More information is available at the conference website at http://www.umass.edu/jitp/

Call for Papers: Pre-ICIS Workshop on eGovernment Research
This one day workshop is sponsored by AIS SIG eGovernment and will take place prior to International Conference on Information Systems (More information on the conference is available at http://www.icis09.org ). Submissions are invited for presentation and discussion at the 2009 SIG eGovernment Workshop to be held from 8.30 am -5 pm on Tuesday, December  15, 2009, Marriott Desert Ridge Hotel, Phoenix. More information about the workshop is available at http://sigegov.org

Call for Papers: The 8th annual Eastern European eGov Days
The days will be held on 21-23 April 2010 in Prague, Czech Republic and titled "Changing Concepts & eGovernment as a Service. The event is jointly organised by: Forum e|Government / OCG-Austrian Computer Society, Vienna (AT) and EPMA/Vysocina Region (CZ) with partners. The annual Eastern European e|Gov Days has become a recognised platform for dialogue and knowledge transfer between Western and Eastern European countries. This event brings together over  200 professionals from the private and public sector in a lively exchange of experience and ideas and real life examples.
More information is available at http://www.epma.cz/eeegov-days.html>http://www.epma.cz/eeegov-days.html

Call for Papers: International Conference on e-Government in Turkey

The Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TÝKA) together with the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRIC) and the eGovernment Centre of the Public Administration Institute for Turkey and the Middle East (TODAÝE eDEM) co-organise the "International Conference on e-Government: Sharing Experiences-eGOVSharE2009" which will take place on December 8-11, 2009 in Antalya, Turkey.  The purpose of the conference is to bring together senior government officials and academicians from various countries to discuss the e- Government policies and implementations. Additionally, the conference is intending to establish a common platform to enable the e-Government implementing senior policy makers and executives, and academicians to share their knowledge and experience. The Conference Organisation Committee cordially invites you attend eGOVSharE2009 Conference. You are requested to fill in the application form placed at  http://edem.todaie.gov.tr and send it back to the contact address provided below, by 31 October 2009. If you are willing to present a paper you can submit via https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/EGOV2009/. 

Call for Papers: IJEP Special Issue on Gender and Social Computing

The primary objective of the International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP) is to lay the foundations of E-Politics as an emerging interdisciplinary area of research and practice, as well as, to offer a venue for publications that focus on theories and empirical research on the manifestations of E-Politics in various contexts and environments. E-Politcs is defined as influence attempts facilitated by or related to electronic media or to the information technology field. As such, it is seen as interdisciplinary, encompassing areas such as information systems, political science, social science (psychology, sociology, and cultural studies), security, ethics, law, management and others.

Recommended topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to the following: 1) IT and Gender at Work (the behavior of men and women as on-line consumers, service providers, etc.  the roles that men and women play in virtual teams,  the impact of gender on the IT profession,  information technology as an enabler of leadership for women in various professions, The effect of gender on adoption of IT in various professions, The impact of IT on changing the work/home balance); 2) eDating (The ways in which IT affects the balance of power between consumers of eDating services,  The ways that technology affects the behavior of eDaters, The impact of culture on eDating practices, The manner in which technology shapes different eDating environments); 3)  Virtual communities and social networking (Gender relations in a social networking environments, Gender relations in gaming communities, Gender relations in virtual communities, Gender relation in virtual worlds, Gender relations in social networking environments that are supported by technologies other than the Internet (e.g., cell phones, Internet TV); 4) ePolitics (Gender issues in IT supported party politics, including in the last US elections, Gender differences in IT enabled grass-roots politics, Gender issues in eVoting, Gender issues in the politics of eGovernment, Gender issues and the politics of cyber security). Submission guidelines are available at
http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guidelinessubmission.pdf

Call for Papers: special issue Scope, Objective, and Achievement of E-government:
E-government to   E-governance

It is our pleasure to seek article proposals for a special issue of International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) whose focus is on "Scope, Objective, and Achievement of E-government: E-government to   E-governance". IJEGR is a peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary international journal that publishes high-quality, original research about electronic government. Electronic government is broadly defined within topics such as but not limited to the hardware and software technology, e-government adoption and diffusion, e-government policy, e-government planning and management, e-government applications and e-government impacts. The journal also serves as a forum for scholars and practitionersto present theoretical and philosophical discussions on current issues relating to the practice of electronicgovernment. Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this onor before January 1,2010. All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication. More information is available at http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guidelinessubmission.pdf. 

Call for Papers: Transforming Government

The journal publishes leading scholarly and practitioner research on the subject of transforming

government through its people, processes and policy. Unique and progressive in its approach,

the journal seeks to recognise both the multidisciplinary and the interdisciplinary perspectives

of e-Government, and encourages both pure and applied research that impacts central and local

Government, with international perspectives also welcome. It will also be interested in exploring

how research carried out in the private sector can be applied to the public sector as a means of

improving efficiency and effectiveness. Coverage is international and focused on original research

in e-Government ICT, service chain issues, public sector management, policy implications of

developing environments, and organizational and human resource issues. To submit an article,

please go to the journal homepage at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/tg.htm, or contact:

The Editor, Professor Zahir Irani, Brunel University, UK E-mail: Zahir.Irani@Brunel.ac.uk,

or the publisher, Kelly Pycroft, E-mail: kpycroft@emeraldinsight.com 

Call for Papers: International Journal of Electronic Governance

International Journal of Electronic Governance (IJEG) is an academic journal focusing on interdisciplinary issues of electronic governance and digital collaboration in the domains of administrative, political and social interaction world-wide. IJEG is published in english by Inderscience Publishers and all submitted manuscripts are subject to a double-blind review process. Full text of the IJEG inaugural and the second issues available from http://www.inderscience.com/ijeg

Call for Papers: PISTA 2010

The 8th International Conference on Politics and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications: PISTA 2010 (http://www.2010iiisconferences.org/PISTA). The conferences will be held on June 29th - July 2nd, 2010 in Orlando, Florida, USA. The deadlines for both conferences are the following: Papers/Abstracts Submissions and Invited Sessions Proposals: November 11th, 2009, Authors Notifications: January 13th, 2010, Camera-ready, full papers: February 3rd, 2010

Call for Papers: IMCIC 2010

The International Multi-Conference on Complexity, Informatics and Cybernetics: IMCIC 2010 will take place on April 6 -9, 2010 in Orlando, Florida, USA.  Papers/Abstracts Submissions and Invited Sessions Proposals are due by October 21th, 2009. All Submitted papers/abstracts will go through three reviewing processes: (1) double-blind (at least three reviewers), (2) non-blind, and (3) participative peer reviews. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those papers/abstracts that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in JSCI Journal. More information is available at http://www.2010iiisconferences.org/IMCIC

Call for Papers: CCCT 20010

The 8th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2010 will take place on April 6 -9, 2010, in Orlando, Florida, USA. Deadlines are the following: Papers/Abstracts Submissions and Invited Sessions Proposals: September 30th, 2009, Authors Notifications: November 16th, 2009, Camera-ready, full papers: December 16th, 2009 More information is available at

http://www.2010iiisconferences.org/CCCT

Call for Papers: RMCI 2010

The 7th International Symposium on Risk Management and Cyber-Informatics: RMCI 2010 will take place on June 29-July 2, 2010 in Orlando, Florida, USA. The deadlines are the following: October 14th, 2009: Submission of draft papers (2000-5000), extended abstracts (400-2000) and abstracts for interdisciplinary communication (200-600 words), November 30th, 2009: Notifications of acceptance February 10th, 2010: Submission of camera-ready or final versions of the accepted papers. More information is available at http://www.2010iiisconferences.org/RMCI

Information Polity: Call for Papers

Authors who wish to write articles for future editions of Information Polity are requested to submit their manuscripts electronically to the Editorial Assistant: Dr Alasdair Marshall, email: amar2@gcal.ac.uk. For more detailed instructions please refer to the Authors Corner on the IOS Press website: www.iospress.nl
 

Grant Opportunities and Announcements

The e-Government EndNote Reference Library has been updated to Rev 5.0
The Digital Government Society makes available to members and non-members version 5.0 (May 2009) of the E-Government Master Library in EndNote TM (Version X2) XML format or a Package Version in ZIPformat. The library currently contains 3,090 references of predominantly English language, peer-reviewed work. The library has been cleaned, and some 300 references were removed, since they did not meet the inclusion criteria or were undetected duplicates. The library now contains 3,090 entries, a net increase of 21.79 % over version 3.2 (July 2008). We continued detecting older work, which has been added. Also, 345 entries (11.16 %) published in 2008 were included. In order to download the library, please register yourself and accept the GPL license agreement. We provide the reference in EndNote XML or as a zippedPackage Lib, so that they can be imported by various EndNote versions. For the XML version, please use the EndNote IMPORT function (select EndNote XML document).Click here to access the EndNote Library

Free Public Comment Analysis Toolkit Launched at UMass Amherst
Researchers in the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pittsburgh have launched a free, Web-based beta version of the Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT) to assist government agencies in searching, analyzing, and responding to citizen comments submitted through federal regulatory sites like www.regulations.gov. The software research and development was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. To test PCAT, visit http://pcat-test.qdap.net.

ParticipateDB

ParticipateDB is a nifty little directory of online tools for public participation. The site went live on September 15, 2009 and is currently in closed alpha. Take a sneak peek at our initial round of 25 tools and 10 projects. The website is http://participatedb.com/

The World e-Parliament Conference

The World e-Parliament Conference is the annual forum of the community of parliaments addressing, from both the policy and technical perspectives, how the use of information and communication technology can help improve representation, transparency, accountability, openness, and effectiveness in the complex parliamentary environment. The World e-Parliament Conference 2009, to take place on 3, 4 and 5 November 2009 at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., builds on the results of two previous conferences held respectively in Geneva (2007) and Brussels (2008), as well as on the findings of the World e-Parliament Report 2008. The 2009 event is co-organized by the United Nations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament . More information is available at http://www.ictparliament.org/wepc2009/

ICANN Studienkreis meeting in Barcelona

The 10th meeting of the ICANN Studienkreis will take place on January 21-22, 2010, at the Rivoli Rambla Hotel in Barcelona, Spain. The final programme will be published on the ICANN Studienkreis Website early November (http://www.icann-studienkreis.net) when we open also the website for registration. You will find also a link to the hotel for your reservation and links to some other hotels in the neighborhood of the Rivoli Rambla Hotel.  

DGSNA Board Elections

The Digital Government Society of North America is holding elections for its Board at the end of the year.  Positions are for the next two years. Our timetable is as follows: By October 15, all DGSNA members are notified of the slate and invited to add other candidates; By November 10, the period for additional nominations closes; November 15 to December 15: balloting takes place; January 1: The new officers and board take office. More information is available at www.dgsociety.org

Call for Proposals for Transparency and Democracy Websites

mySociety has teamed up with the Open Society Institute http://www.soros.org/ (OSI) to help people in Central and Eastern Europe build transparency and democracy websites suited to the needs and realities of their countries. In the UK mySociety runs a variety of sites such as http://www.theyworkforyou.com/http://www.fixmystreet.com/ and our Freedom of Information website http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/. As a result of running these, we know that there are lots of people outside the UK longing to build similar sites that help increase transparency and accountability in their own government institutions. We have now launched a Call for Proposals for participants in Central and Eastern Europe, similar to the one we recently ran in the UK cee.mysociety.org . 

NSF Programs

The programs can be a good fit with certain types of digital government research:
Innovation and Organizational Sciences  (IOS)
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5378&org=SES&from=home

Law and Social Sciences

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5422&govDel=USNSF_39

Sociology

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5369&govDel=USNSF_39

Political Science

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5418&govDel=USNSF_39

Creative IT

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09572/nsf09572.htm?govDel=USNSF_25
Decision, Risk and Management Sciences  (DRMS)

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5423&org=SES&from=home 

Science, Technology and Society

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5324&govDel=USNSF_39

Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry  (GOALI)
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13706

SBE Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13453&govDel=USNSF_50
The full list of Social and Economic Science programs at NSF can be
found at http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=SES

The NSF Regional Grants Conference will take place in Jackson, MS on October 5 and 6.

More information is available at http://www.nsf.gov/events/event_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114599&govDel=USNSF_13

Disclosure of White House Visitor Access Records Online

In September President Barack Obama took another important step toward a more open  and transparent government by announcing a historic new policy to  voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records.  Each  month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be  made available online. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Opening-up-the-peoples-house

JITP Mini-Summit
The mini-summit titled "Online Deliberation in Politics and Policy" onNovember 23, 2009, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. The featured speaker is Dr. Alexander Trechsel, Swiss Chair Professor in Federalism and Democracy at the European University Institute and the talk is titled "Attracting parties and voters: Party self-placement and voter profiling in the EU Profiler project". The Editors of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) invite proposals for workshop presentations on the theme of "Online Deliberation in Politics and Policy". This 1-day working meeting will  feature 4-6 extended presentations from authors engaged in ongoing research likely to result in a submission to JITP: http://www.jitp.net/ For more information, please contact Stuart Shulman at stu@polsci.umass.edu

Open Government: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration
The National Center for Digital Government presents "Open Government: Transparency, Participation and   Collaboration" with Dr. Beth Noveck, United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm at the Isenberg School of Management 108 at University of Massachusetts Amherst Campus. Dr. Noveck will discuss the Obama Administration's call for transparency and open government and its commitment to achieving an "unprecedented level of openness in Government." Dr. Noveck directs the White House Open Government Initiative at www.whitehouse.gov/open. She is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (2009) and editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (2006). She is on leave as a professor law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and McClatchy visiting professor of communication at Stanford University. The lecture will be streamed live and archived on ncdg.org.

Malmo09
Europe's first-ever popular e-government event Malmo09 will take place on November 19-20, 2009. This spontaneous local response to the fifth official EU e-gov event is yet to be created by its participants. It promises: no presentation longer than six minutes, focus on transparency, data mashups and pertinent art and an exemplary Swedish chef. To join in visit Malmo09.org or email rsvp@malmo09.org

New E-Governance Book Series by IOS Press

IOS Press is specialized in advanced publications in the field of administrative sciences. Recently, the Press started a new series named Global E- Governance.  The publisher maintains longstanding collaborations with international organisations like IIAS and NATO and publishes a book series Innovation and the Public Sector, edited by Professor Victor Bekkers. In addition they publish 3 journals: Information Polity, edited by Prof. John Taylor, I-Ways, edited by Mr. Russel Pipe, and the International Journal of Regulation and Governance, published with TERI (New Delhi).

SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)
The Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is pleased to announce a call to faculty for interdisciplinary research field proposals for the 2009 Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) program.  Established in 2006, the DPDF combines financial support and workshop experience for early-stage graduate students engaged in predissertation research and developing their dissertation proposals. The DPDF program is designed to intervene at a critical moment in the career development of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences by aiding their transition from students to researchers. It provides complementary interdisciplinary perspectives to students across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Faculty applicants must be tenured at different doctoral degree-granting programs at US universities and apply in teams of two. DPDF Research Directors lead groups of 12 graduate student fellows in two four-day workshops Research directors receive a stipend of $10,000 each. More information about the program may be found at: http://programs.ssrc.org/dpdf

Contact Meelis Kitsing at newsletter@dgsociety.org for questions or to submit material for future newsletters.

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