Officers and Board Members

Jochen Scholl, University of Washington
President

Jochen Scholl is an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s Information School. He teaches and conducts research on information management, process change, and organizational transformation in government and other organizations. He employs both quantitative computer simulation techniques and qualitative research designs. Jochen has studied the strategies, motives, and focal areas of business and process change in digital government projects as well as the current practices employed in such projects. His special interests include integration, interoperability, organizational transformation, and the strategic choices in mobile technology diffusion in digital government.

He is the PI of the NSF-funded Fully Mobile City Government research project (2005 to 2008). Jochen is involved in the organization of the three major conferences on electronic or digital government. He chairs the Electronic Government Track at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). He also serves as a member of the organizing committees of dgo2006 and the DEXA/EGOV conferences. He has been engaged in the formation of the Digital Government Society of North America and was elected to the board of officers by public vote. He  has also been appointed to serve on the European E-Government Society’s board as liaison to the North American Society. Jochen facilitated the worldwide discussion and voting processes on both the Society’s Mission Statement and its constitutions. He has also been an active member of the Society’s journal committee.

John Bertot, University of Maryland College Park

President-elect

John Carlo Bertot is Professor and Director of the Center for Library & Information Innovation in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland College Park.  He also serves as Associate Director for Research for the Center for Information Policy and E-Government.  Dr. Bertot received his Ph.D. from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.  His research spans government agency technology planning and evaluation, information and telecommunications policy, e-government, and library planning and evaluation. Bertot served on the Board of the Digital Government Society of North America for the last two years, and serves as chair of the International Standards Organization’s (ISO) Library Performance Indicator working group and serves as a member of the National Information Standards Organization’s (NISO) Business Information Topic committee. Bertot is past Chair of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Library Research Round Table.  Also, Bertot is editor of Government Information Quarterly and Library Quarterly.  Over the years, Bertot has received funding for his research from the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Government Accountability Office, the American Library Association, and the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.  More information on Bertot is available at  terpconnect.umd.edu/~jbertot.

Yigal Arens, University of Southern California Information Science Institute
Treasurer

Dr. Yigal Arens is Director of the Intelligent Systems Division of the University of Southern California's Information Science Institute, located in Marina del Rey, California, USA; Director of DGRC, the USC/Columbia University Digital Government Research Center; and Research Professor at USC’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering. Dr. Arens received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests have been digital government, and information integration. 

In 1983 he joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California.  In 1987 he joined USC's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) where for almost ten years he headed the SIMS (Single Interface to Multiple Sources) research group, specializing in integration of heterogeneous databases and other information sources. Dr. Arens has been Director of the Intelligent Systems Division, one of the largest Artificial Intelligence research labs in the US, since 1999. Since 2005 he has been Director of DGRC, which he was Co-Director of since its creation in 1999. In 2002, Dr. Arens joined the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as a Research Professor.

Andrea Kavanaugh, Virginia Tech

Secretary

A Fulbright scholar and Cunningham Fellow, Dr. Kavanaugh is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. She is also the Associate Director of the university-wide interdisciplinary research Center for Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her research lies in the areas of social computing, communication behavior and effects, and development communication. Prior to joining the HCI Center in 2002, she served as Director of Research for the community computer network known as the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) from its inception in 1993. She holds an MA in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Planning (with a focus on telecommunications) from Virginia Tech.

Andrea currently serves on the board of the International Telecommunications Society (ITS), an interdisciplinary association of professionals in academia, the telecommunications industry and government. She is the author, co-author or editor of three books, 15 refereed journal articles, 14 refereed or invited book chapters; 18 other articles, reviews or technical reports, 18 refereed presentations at professional meetings; and over 40 invited professional presentations or talks. Her research is published by MIT Press, Springer, Greenwood, Kluwer, and Artech House and in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Interacting with Computers, American Behavioral Scientist, and The Information Society. Her work has also appeared in Proceedings of the Digital Government Conferences (2005, 2006) and of the Proceedings of the Communities and Technologies Conferences (2003, 2005, 2007).

Eduard Hovy, University of Southern California Information Science Institute
Past President

Dr. Eduard Hovy is a Deputy Division Director at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in Los Angeles.  He is also a research faculty member of USC’s Computer Science Department and an Advisory Professor at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.  Dr. Hovy is director of ISI’s natural Language Group, one of the largest university-based research groups in human language technology in the world, and director of the Center for Knowledge Integration and Discovery at USC.  He has written and (co-)edited 5 books and over 170 technical articles on a variety of topics. 

Dr. Hovy has actively participated in the establishment and growth of research in Digital Government in the USA since the inception of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Digital Government research program in 1999.  Dr. Hovy was a founding member of the NSF’s Digital Government Conference series dg.o (see http://www.dgrc.org/conferences/).  He served as program chair in 2001 and 2002 and as co-conference chair in 2003 and 2004.  Over the past 6 years, Dr. Hovy has participated in several of the NSF’s Digital Government research initiation workshops, which bring together parties from various areas to investigate the potential for a new research program.  Typically, such workshops include researchers in IT, Social Science, and Political Science, staff from relevant government offices and agencies, and possibly representatives from interested public groups and organizations.  Dr. Hovy helped write the final reports for several of these workshops.  Finally, in 2005-06, Dr. Hovy served as chair of the committee to create the North American Digital Government society. 

At the University of Southern California, Dr. Hovy is a founding member and director for research of the Digital Government Research Center (DGRC; see http://www.dgrc.org/), and participates in discussions at USC to create a university-wide Center for Digital Government.  Dr. Hovy has (co-)directed several research projects in a diversity of topics including ontologies and e-rulemaking.

J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Centro de Investigación y Docenia Económicas, Mexico
Board Member

J. Ramon Gil-Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economicas (Center for Research and Teaching in Economics) in Mexico City and a Research Fellow at the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). Currently, he is also a Faculty Affiliate at the National Center for Digital Government, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Ramon is the author or co-author of articles published in The International Public Management Journal, Government Information Quarterly, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, European Journal of Information Systems, Reforma y Democracia, Gestion y Politica Publica, Espiral: Estudios sobre Estado y Sociedad, Convergencia, and Ciencias de Gobierno, among others. His research interests include collaborative electronic government, inter-organizational information integration, adoption and implementation of emergent technologies, information technologies in the budgeting process, digital divide policies, and multi-method research approaches.

Norman J Jacknis, Cisco IBSG Public Sector Group

Board Member

Dr. Norman Jacknis, Director, Cisco's IBSG Public Sector Group (the company's strategic consulting think tank), is a globally recognized expert in government innovation and transformation. Dr. Jacknis has extensive executive and leadership experience in local and state government. Before joining Cisco in Feb. 2008, Jacknis served more than ten years as CIO and commissioner of Westchester County, NY government, where he was responsible for all of the government's technology including software, web presence and multi-media/design services. In addition to the County, he provided these services to municipalities and other non-profit community organizations. Dr. Jacknis served as co-chair of the technology and architecture committee of the New York State CIO Council, participated in the Federal/State/Local Partnership for Intergovernmental Innovation and continues as the technology adviser to the County Executives of America. Prior to his public service, Dr. Jacknis had diverse experience as an executive in the software industry, with emphasis on Internet applications and distributed computing. Under his leadership, Westchester County won numerous awards, including the Center for Digital Government's top ten digital counties in the country, American City & County's Crown Communities Award for technology and, most recently, one of the global top seven Intelligent Communities. Government Technology Magazine selected him as one of the nation's "Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers who, using technology ... broke bureaucratic inertia to better serve the public" - a list which included not just technology leaders, but elected officials as well. Jacknis received his Doctorate, Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Princeton University. Among many activities beyond his work, he is Chairman of the Fairfield-Westchester Chapter of the Society for Information Management (a national association of CIOs and senior IT executives), Chairman of Westchester's Internet society (WATPA, founded in the early 1990s), Chair of the New York State Regents Advisory Council on Libraries, President of the New York Metro Library Council, among several leadership positions in the library community.

Personal Statement: I am Director, Cisco IBSG Public Sector. IBSG is Cisco's "think tank" and pro-bono strategic advisory service. We work with CEOs and senior government leaders to help them understand the impact of technology on policy and organization and how they can respond in innovative ways. A lot of my time is spent with state, regional and local chief elected executives. In particular, I work with them on policy areas, like future foundations for economic growth with the US Conference of Mayors, but also on ideas for using the Internet to establish new ways of governing and enhancing citizen participation. For example, I am working with a large county on facilitating citizen-to-citizen collaboration to delivery services to each other as an alternative to traditional civil service delivery of public services. Early in the Obama administration, I worked with GSA to help them use collaborative web tools to better integrate the roles of Federal, State and Local government with regard to the economic stimulus program. You can see some more of these ideas on my blog. Prior to joining Cisco, I was Chief Information Officer and staff aide to the Westchester County (New York) County Executive, where we developed and experimented with all sorts of Internet and communications-based services and policy. Prior to that in the early 1990s, among other things, I was project development director at ICL's American research labs, where we created software for graphic-based web browsers, search engines, communities, etc. - way before the market was ready for any of this. Since I'm a newcomer to DGSNA, it is not clear to me yet where I can be most helpful to the organization. But I do look forward to participating in DGSNA.

Luis Felipe Luna-Reyes, Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, México

Board Member

Luis Felipe Luna-Reyes is a Professor in the Business School at the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla in México. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University at Albany. Luna-Reyes is co-chair of an International Research Group with members of Canada, US and Mexico, and also a member of the Mexican National Research System. He is the author or co-author of articles published in Government Information Quarterly, European Journal of Information Systems, Inernational Journal of Electronic Government Research, Gestión y Política Pública, Revista de Administración Pública, among others. His research focuses on electronic government and on modeling collaboration processes in the development of information technologies across functional and organizational boundaries.

Personal Statement: I have been a member of the digital government community for several years, participating in the Annual Research Conference since 2003. I have been Program Committee Member, Local Chair, and currently Conference Co-Chair for the 2010 Conference. I am interested in serving as a Society Board Member to continue involved in the promotion of relevant digital government research and practice in the North American Region.

Theresa Pardo, Center for Technology in Government

Board Member

Theresa A. Pardo is Deputy Director of the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany. She is also a faculty member in Public Administration and Policy and Informatics. Theresa has directed numerous applied research projects with government partners and written articles, research reports, book chapters and case studies focusing on IT innovation in government, cross-boundary information sharing and integration, trust and knowledge sharing, preservation of government digital records, and XML.

Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Library of Congress, among others. Theresa is co-chair of the North American Digital Government Working Group and serves on various editorial and advisory boards including Government Information Quarterly, the International Advisory Board for Mobile Technologies for the United Nations, the Financial Market Regulation Program at the University at Albany and the Expert Working Group for the EUReGov project. She was recently appointed as a senior adviser to the Informatization Research Institution, State Information Center, P.R. China. Theresa began working as part of the dg.o team in 2004 as program co-chair for dg.o 2005 held in Atlanta and for dg.o 2006 in San Diego. She served as conference co-chair for dg.o 2007. During the Society formation process she was a member of the constitution drafting committee and the first election committee. She is currently chair of the DGSNA sponsorship committee. Theresa is also serving as program co-chair for the International Conference on Electronic Governance (ICEGOV) and co-chairs the Emerging Topics Mini-Track for the Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences. Theresa holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University at Albany.

Andrew Philpot, University of Southern California Information Science Institute

Board Member

Andrew Philpot is a Research Scientist at USC/ISI. Under the NSF Digital Government program he has performed work in information integration, question answering, data mining, and ontologies. Heavily involved in the Digital Government Society from its founding, in recent years he has served as webmaster and co-chair of the poster and demo sessions at the annual conference. His goals as prospective board member are to broaden society membership to include more students, professionals, and government employees while maintaining the core strength of academic researchers, and to work for greater coherence between computer science, public policy, social science segments of the Society base. Mr. Philpot is a graduate of Duke University and earned the degree of Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University in 1990.

Rejean Roy, CEFRIO, Montréal, Canada

Board Member

I'm a senior advisor at CEFRIO, the Centre francophone d'informatisation des organisations, a Quebecois not-for-profit whose mission is to foster the intelligent use of information technology (IT) by public organizations and businesses. To do that, CEFRIO liaises between university researchers and practitioners like public servants and consultants.

At CEFRIO, I help designing, funding and launching research projects in the field of digital government; I act as a consultant to the Quebec government; and I take part in various knowledge transfer activities.

For example, in 2008-09, I co-designed and co-managed a research project and large conference called "Generation C", in which CEFRIO studied how young Quebecois use IT, and how their new IT usages might change the way they act as students, consumers, (government) workers, and citizens (six Quebec ministries and agencies are involved).

As a consultant, I led a study on the way the Quebec government could green its IT (2008), and I acted as secretary of the committee responsible for writing Quebec's vision of digital government (2004).

As a knowledge transfer specialist, I've written a half-dozen practical guides, among which the recent "Guide sur la gouvernance et les technologies de l'information" (on boards and IT governance) and "Brancher les citoyens, les organismes et les entreprises du Quebec rural a Internet haute vitesse" (a how-to publication that helps local players launch viable broadband projects).

As a board member of the DGSNA, I'd like to help the Society increase its presence in Canada, especially in French-speaking networks. I'd also like to help building bridges between researchers and practitioners, so that the knowledge created by the former is increasingly used and applied by the latter.

I hold a bachelor of commerce from McGill University (Montreal), a graduate diploma in international relations from l'Universite catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) and a master's degree in political science from l'Universite Laval (Quebec City).

Norman Sondheimer, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Board Member

Dr. Norman K. Sondheimer is co-Director of the Electronic Enterprise Institute (EEI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Senior Research Scientist in the University's Computer Science Department. EEI is dedicated to bringing UMass faculty together with business and government units to devise new approaches to the interdisciplinary challenges posed by electronic enterprises and to investigate fundamental issues that underlie electronic commerce, digital government and the virtual enterprise. Beginning in 2000, he has partnered with Professors Leon Osterweil and Ethan Katsh in a series of efforts to improve the adoption rate of e-government systems. They have seen this as an effort to build trust among the stakeholders in the systems. To encourage this they have been integrating powerful process definition and analysis approaches into participatory computer systems design methods. They have been studying the adoption of Online Dispute Resolution at the U.S. Government's National Mediation Board and most recently looking at disputes surrounding Electronic Health Records (EHR) for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and others agencies.

The DGSNA has been particularly effective in providing a community to obtain feedback on the research ideas EEI is exploring and facilitating dialogue on new issues. In fact, our first exposure to the issues in EHR came at a DG.o conference. On the DGSNA board, I hope to nurture this function. In particular, I plan to help bring DG researchers together with government leaders to devise new approaches to the challenges posed by digital government and to investigate fundamental issues that underlie this enterprise.

Christine Williams, Bentley University

Board Member

Christine is Professor of Political Science in the Global Studies Department at Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts. She received her M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University. Her research focuses on political communication, with emphasis on new and emerging technologies, and e-government. She is a member of a National Science Foundation funded project team studying design issues for public safety response management systems. Other research focuses on the 2006 and 2008 elections for Congress, with emphasis on the candidates' use of web sites, social networks and new technologies. She serves as managing editor, North America for the Journal of Political Marketing, as associate editor and on the Senior Editorial Board of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics and on the advisory board of The International Journal of E-Politics. Her work has appeared in academic journals, trade and professional association publications, and in news media outlets worldwide. These include Information Polity, Government Information Quarterly, the Social Science Computer Review and the Journal of Political Marketing, practitioner publications such as Campaigns & Elections, IEE Computer, Mass High Tech, professional outlets such as The Chronicle of Philanthropy and CBS Marketwatch, and media coverage that includes CNN, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.

The DGSNA Board is concerned with membership recruitment, financial viability, member services, and communications. Initially our focus was providing core member services, primarily a high quality, well attended conference. Now, we need a business plan to ensure long term financial viability that will allow us to expand the number and diversity of services (e.g., professional discounts, journal, research opportunities, awards/grants, database(s), e-library). I hope to help the Board in its ongoing efforts to communicate DGSNA activities and members' ideas and contributions internally, develop partnerships with related organizations, cultivate media contacts, and generate publicity for the Society externally.