Building and Sustaining an International Digital Government Research Community of Practice

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ABSTRACTNSF-0540069Dawes, SharonOver the past decade, growing evidence demonstrates that "digital government" (DG) is developing as a global field of inquiry. Because of the relative newness of the DG field, there is insufficient interaction among researchers in different countries compared to what one finds in more established scientific disciplines. Most funded research around the world addresses DG challenges within the context of a single country; only a few investigations have compared results across national boundaries or tackled problems that are transnational in scope. The result of this situation is that comparative and transnational issues in DG, which are of growing importance in an increasingly networked world, are not receiving the attention they deserve. To address this gap, the team will plan, develop, and implement a four-year strategy to create opportunities and venues for international research discussions and to enable U.S. researchers and educators to advance their work through international collaboration. A small international advisory group will be named to help guide the work, connect to research sponsors in other countries, and periodically assess progress toward goals.The proposed activities will document the development and current state of digital government research and foster relationships and intellectual engagements that will enrich it as a domain of inquiry throughout the world. The results will contribute to innovative research questions and methods, identify gaps in current knowledge that could be the focus of future research, and constitute a useful guide to individual researchers who are interested in forming relationships with international investigators who share their interests. All of these effects create an arena where research problems amenable to international treatment can be identified and investigated. This set of activities would benefit the NSF research community as well as those in other countries by building and sustaining relationships among both researchers and research sponsors around the world in an effort to catalog, compare, and where possible build synergies among funding decisions about digital government research. This project will contribute directly to the ability of US researchers and graduate students to work successfully, and in a sustained way, in international settings. The proposed international summer institute will help to train future generations of digital government scientists.