Sharpening an e-government tool
CTG's e-Gov FirstStop mines the Web to gather top-level e-gov reports under one URL
By Mack Reed
dg.o Communications Manager

Latest DG News

• dg.o 2006 Convenes May 21-24, 2006   • dg.o 2006 Early Registration Ends April 10th! • dg.o 2006 Issues CFP - Tutorials • dg.o 2006 Issues CFP - Workshops • dg.o 2006 features Workshops on:    eRulemaking    GeoInformatics • dg.o 2006 features Tutorial on:    •Social Network Analysis • New DG Team Pursues eRulemaking • IEEE ISI2006 Convenes May 22-24, 2006 • eChallenges e-2006 Issues CFP • DG Research Helps Predict Urban Growth • Swapping Secrets of the Double Helix • UK and DO-Wire Launch e-Gov Best Practices wiki • DG Team Develops "Virtual Agora" for e-Gov • Mapping for Times of Crisis • Exploring Detection of Crisis Hotspots • Report: Mass eMail Campaigns Harmful • Scenario-Based Designs for Stat Studies • US, EU Explore Info Integration • DG Team Develops Digital Interpreter • DG Study Gives Teeth to FBI • Research Smooths Road for Small Businesses • DG Researchers Parsing in Tongues • e-Gov Journal Issus Call for Articles • See all news stories Contribute to dgOnline

Point Google at the Web armed only with the search term "e-government" and see what you get: More than 400,000 Web pages.

Even if you pared those down to a few hundred pages with tighter keywording and devoted an hour or two a week to reading them all, you would have a hard time wading through it all the material to reach the information you need.

That was the impetus for the University at Albany's Center for Technology in Government (CTG) to build e-Gov FirstStop, a "knowledge repository" of peer-reviewed e-government resources, according to CTG director and dg.o researcher Sharon Dawes.

The idea sprang from the CTG e-Government Roundtable held in March 2001. Representatives from 43 state and local government and private and nonprofit organizations there identified 45 topics of concern and selected 17 of them for small group discussions.

Eight themes emerged from the roundtable discussions, and covered the full scope of the e-government challenge, including the need for creating banks of knowledge and expertise on the topic.

The resulting site's review committee of e-gov scholars and government experts pores over recommendations of e-government resources submitted by the site's audience and other experts in the field. the committee reviews executive-level briefings, research and best-practices reports, case studies and Web sites devoted to e-Government work, then adds the best of them to a searchable database.

Traffic to the site since its launch in March has been "delightfully heavy," averaging 200 to 250 pageviews per day says Sharon Dawes, director of CTG and a primary investigator on several Digital Government projects.

"We never expect it to have thousands and thousands of items in it, but it's more liklely that it will be a modest coleciton of bery very good material," says Dawes. "People can feel confident in going to e-Gov FirstStop ... that they'll be looking at things that a committee of their peers found to be useful and worthwhile."