Digital Government Community Looks Ahead
With Talk of NSF Withdrawing Funding for Conference, a More Mature DG Community Looks Toward Building Its Future
By Karen Heyman
For the DGRC

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

The 2004 Digital Government Conference closed with many participants happily pointing out the necessity for a certain irony: DG researchers may study online interaction and virtual communities, but they still need to meet face to face.

Several defended that irony by citing the literature of online collaboration: It's been established that partners work best if they first hold in-person discussions. Once they've met, and bonded, they can then go back to their respective offices, or even countries, and work together using digital tools - in some cases, the very tools they're working together to develop.

"I feel like each conference has gotten larger, there's more and more people getting to know one another," says Valerie Gregg, NSF Digital Government co-Program Director, "I think in the future we're going to see more exciting DG projects, but we're also going to see some of our principal investigators working together on other programs - this is about building community."

By that standard the conference was a great success, with researchers having shared serendipitous elevator- and coffee-queue encounters that only real life can provide. One of the conference's three optional field trips (conferees were given a choice of time at Boeing, the Seattle Police Department or Microsoft), gave a surprise demonstration of the value of just such encounters - and of the reach of DG research.

Microsoft Sr. Researcher Tom Barclay was showing off Microsoft's TerraServer-USA, a Web site hosting geo-spatial data of the United States provided by the USGS. The project had begun as a way for Microsoft to display the capabilities of their enterprise-level server software, and had eventually become a highly-valued public resource. "The government has all this data," said Barclay, "and they stopped a half mile short of making it useful."

But, he went on; there were those who had, most notably a "terrific project" from a university. And then, he flashed the USC logo on screen-to the surprised delight of USC's Information Science Institute's Digital Government researchers Yigal Arens and Jose Luis Ambite sitting in the audience, watching someone they'd never met before describe in detail their own work and the work of their colleague Craig Knoblock on geospatial data integration. Praising the ISI work, Barclay commented, "It was a great opportunity to take a government data set and correct it."

Certainly, that was a great "high" to end the conference on; an indication that the tri-part DG interaction between academia, government and the commercial sector is thriving.

As for the future of the field itself and the conference, says Arens, "The biggest challenge is trying to make this into an independent, self-supporting society conference." Still, he was pleased that his earlier call for volunteers to help create such a society garnered nearly a half dozen offers of help, including those from a foreign researcher and a graduate student.

"Making the conference financially self-supporting is fairly easy," Arens reflected, "I think the real challenge is to create a situation where this is the preferred venue for people's research. Because of the breadth of interest of the attendees, it will be very challenging to convince people that this should be the place where they should bring their research first. But if even if it isn't, it could still be a locus for people who all share this interest in IT or the use of IT within government."

Gregg agrees, saying, "The community needs to mature, if it's going to sustain itself, it's going to have to do that without NSF support. It may be that digital government is ripe for a digital government society, and when you do that, NSF graciously hands off." Gregg says the NSF is exploring the possibility of such a hand-off within two years.

The NSF is also looking into taking the show on the road, "There very well could be an international digital government research conference," said Gregg. "It may rotate between anther country and here, it could be here in '05 and in Europe '06."

Conference Co-Chair Lois Delcambre, Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, OGI School of Science and Engineering was frank about current and future challenges-and at the same time encouraged by them: "I think DG is really difficult, the projects are difficult because they're interdisciplinary; you have to coordinate multiple disciplines and then you also have to coordinate the government part, and you even have the goal of deployment, and the difference between research and deployment is hard. So it's a multi-dimensional problem and we're all feeling our way through this."

"It's actually exciting to see people articulate the problems, because once you identify a problem and hear it again and again, then you can start having strategies about how to deal with it," she concluded. "I see it as a set towards maturing the field, both the DG grant program and DG research."