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DG Researchers from US, EU Meet
"Multiple countries and their asymmetrical approaches create a research problem," says participant L. Jean Camp, Associate Professor at the Kennedy School of Government, sounding eager where others would be daunted. Organized by Lois Delcambre, Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, OGI School of Science and Engineering, OHSU and NSF Digital Government Program Manager Valerie Gregg, the meeting was an all-day brainstorming session that gave participants a chance to understand both how close and how far apart their mutual interests were. "We are blinded by our local cultures," says participant Gary Marchionini, Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, "Hearing some of the details that other people are dealing with, having this cross-cultural exchange, is really important to continuing to perform valuable research." The European Commission expects to have spent nearly 100 million Euros (with a matching funds requirement) on digital government research by 2007, compared to the NSF's annual DG budget of $8.6 million. But it's important to note that this is very far from an apples to apples comparison: "There's all sorts of eGovernment initiatives at federal, state, local level that NSF has nothing to do with, we're just funding research in the digital, Egovernment domain," says Gregg. Nevertheless, there's a need to bear in mind that in addition to the EU funding, individual EU countries are providing their own funding. The European Commission funding is geared towards cross-country collaborations.
"The consequence of that is you still need to take several steps before it's translated into a very concrete service at a regional or national level." Timmers says the problem is that those additional, necessary steps can create a risk that the research may not be fully used. "I think that's an advantage you may have in the United States," say Timmers, "For us it's very important at the European level to try to make the connection to the national policy makers to give a better chance that the research is going to be used." For participants on both sides of the Atlantic, one familiar research question was information sharing. Anyone planning to undertake the technical hurdle of integrating disparate public databases must consider how much of that information will be made available and to whom. Those restrictions (who gets to see tax records, for example) are determined by laws and regulation. They can become especially complicated when one country may insist that personal information remain private - while another mandates it be made public. Here the researchers found common ground, since the necessary "rules-based access" scales up, whether one US state is trying to determine who gets to see the information in one agency's database - or whether the entire European Union is trying to figure out how to share health information on individuals when member countries have different privacy laws. "You must create very clear data descriptions, then people can argue about what to do," says Eduard Hovy of USC's Information Sciences Institute. One overriding approach to deriving a research question is to ask what issues are intrinsically international - immigration for example. Nevertheless, cautions US/EU meeting facilitator Anthony Cresswell, Deputy Director of the Center for Technology in Government at SUNY-Albany, one must always remember there are still economic differences of scale that challenge international technology collaborations. Two countries may both agree on immigration as an issue, but only one may have the resources to implement a digital solution. And all participants agreed that no matter where you are in the world, design frequently does not synch up with practice: "We need to understand how the guys are playing on the field," says Cresswell. Summing up, Timmers says, "I found the meeting quite interesting and successful, it's the intention to ultimately get to topics on which we can really have international research collaboration. You can get much better insights by comparing and by putting the wide range of skills together that are needed to do profound eGovernment research. Those skills are still scarce so it's important to work together, and to address some of these problems that really have an international dimension." Next steps will see some of the participants from both sides of the Atlantic continue with more in-person discussions at upcoming international meetings, as well as email. The U.S. side is currently preparing a working document to both sum up the meeting and suggest points of ongoing dialogue. "We want to express our appreciation for so many EU participants this year," says Gregg. "More broadly, this is the most international participation we've had in the DG conference and we hope it continues. This is an exciting opportunity, we're open to all sorts of opportunities to pursue international collaborations within the government/digital government domains." IST 2004 Event: http://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2004/index_en.htm | ||||||||
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