Welcome to the Digital Government Research Group Page


This project entitled Modeling Online Participation in Local Governance was funded by the National Science Foundation (IIS-0429274) Digital Government Program (September 1, 2004 - February 29, 2008). It was led by the Center for Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, in collaboration with Montgomery County, and the Town of Blacksburg. Please see the Project Summary.

Principal Investigators: Andrea Kavanaugh, Philip Isenhour, Manuel Perez-Quinones, Daniel Dunlap
Outside Consultants: John M. Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Joseph Schmitz
Graduate Research Assistants and affiliated graduate researchers: Sameer Ahuja, B. Joon Kim, Candida Tauro (former research assistants and affiliated researchers: Uma Murthy, Spencer Lee, Hyung Nam Kim, Jaideep Godara, Alain Fabian, Will Randolph, Matt Stover, Andrew Mike, Matthew Cooper, Anshul Midha, Salahaldin Hussein, and research associate, Dr. Than Than Zin).

Project Goals:

  • To understand how citizens use information technology with each other to participate in civic life (find information, stay informed, discuss issues, form opinions, deliberate);
  • To understand how online citizen-to-citizen deliberation links back into local government decision making;
  • To improve the capability and functionality of information technology to serve the interests and needs of citizens and local government for deliberative purposes.

Our project has sought to re-focus the digital government discussion around factors that make for an effective democracy rather than for effective government. We focused on citizen participation in local governance -- including local voluntary associations -- and on better ways that technology can support and facilitate the involvement of citizens and groups in local governance.

Project Activities:

  • Literature Review (see Papers link)
  • Data Collection (interviews, telephone surveys, focus groups, requirements analysis, web logs)
  • Tools modification and prototyping
  • Testbed (restricted)
  • Links to blogs about digital democracy, related research and initiatives

Links to Digital Government Research/Resources

The National Science Foundation Digital Government Program built a broad array of tools, resources and events that may be of use to researchers; these are now maintained by the Digital Government Society of North America.
  • The National Conference on Digital Government Research convenes annually. The 2008 Digital Government conference was be held in Montreal, Canada, May 19-21.
  • The Digital Government Society maintains a library and archives of digital government research and database of DG projects that were formerly maintained by the University of Southern California with support from the NSF DG Program.
  • The DG Society publishes a regular newsletter of digital government research. Published via email, dgOnline covers a broad array of topics related to Digital Government research, government IT, meetins and conferences of interest to the DG community and public policy news.

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Last modified 6/1/08 12:24 PM by kavan (history)
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