U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer to Speak at UMass Amherst On President Obama’s Open Government Initiative

Oct. 23, 2009

Contact:

Ed Blaguszewski 413/545-0444

AMHERST, Mass. – Beth Noveck, director of the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative, will give a talk on “Open Government: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration” on Friday, Oct. 30 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in room 108 of the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The event is open to the public.

The Open Government Initiative was founded the day after Obama took office in January 2009, signaling that it would be a priority of the new administration. The initiative seeks to bring about greater government transparency and accountability and broaden civic participation. By promoting official use of modern technologies like Internet message boards and blogs, it is trying to give all Americans a bigger voice in public policy.

“This will bring potentially dramatic results of great value to the society, to public participation and to the operation of the government,” says Jane E. Fountain, founder and director of the National Center for Digital Government (NCDG) at UMass Amherst, which is hosting the talk.

In her post as Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Noveck has come up against some initial messiness in the promotion of democracy. When the White House inaugurated its Open Government Initiative with an online forum asking citizens for their ideas on how to carry out the president’s open-government pledge, it was flooded with comments on legalizing marijuana, questions about UFO secrets and requests for proof that Obama was born in the United States.

But she met the challenge with aplomb. “Even for people who want to talk about UFOs...we have created a forum for people to have a conversation with each other,” she said at the time. And Noveck believes that collaborative Web sites like Wikipedia prove that groups of users can monitor sites to safeguard their legitimacy. She intends to use public comments and suggestions to help develop the administration’s open government policy further.

Noveck is an expert in the use of emerging digital and online technologies to promote democracy. She is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (2009) and editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (2006). During her appointment as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, she is on leave as professor of law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and McClatchy visiting professor of communication at Stanford University.

The National Center for Digital Government, which is sponsoring the campus event, is a research center based at UMass Amherst in the Center for Public Policy and Administration and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The NCDG applies social science research to the intersection of governance, institutions and government. NCDG works closely with faculty in the Political Science Department as well.

The NCDG is host to a number of efforts that assist the goals of the Open Government Initiative. One such is The Qualitative Data Analysis Program, which has developed tools for decision makers and others to make sense of hundreds of thousands of public comments that flow into federal agencies and to members of Congress.

Another is in the arena of open source and open access, which improve the ability of Web 2.0 applications to communicate with each other. Finally, the NCDG and Political Science Department faculty, including Professor MJ Peterson, works with the Cyber Security Group in the computer science department, so that greater openness and higher volume of public participation online are properly protected from security problems.

The speech is open to the public, but RSVPs to ncdg@pubpol.umass are encouraged. The speech will also be streamed live through www.ncdg.org. For more information about the NCDG and the event, call 413/577-2354 or go to www.ncdg.org.

E-mail story to a friend Printer-friendly version