dg.o2005 Program Shows Evidence of Community's Growing Breadth, Depth
The maturity of older projects and the diversity of new ones mix well with workshops, tutorials and growing trends and influences to attract more non-NSF participants
By Mack Reed
DGRC Communications Manager

dg.o2005
	The 6th National Conference on Digital Government Research convened May 15-18 in Atlanta, GA. Program: dg.o2005 Shows Evidence of Growing Breadth Overview: Stronger Roots, Broader Application Keynote: Neil Eisner on Challenges of e-Rulemaking DG Society Forming to Help Community Face Uncertain Future Home page Program at a glance Complete program Press release
NSF/DG Program Manager Lawrence Brandt opens the conference.

Stephen Rathbun demonstrates a system for detecting and analyzing hotspots

Facing all the growing pains of a young, multidisciplinary community seeking to find its center and direction, the 6th National Conference on Digital Government Research Digital Government convened in Atlanta in May, 2005, showing increasing strength as a gathering of colleagues and depth as a venue for study.

As National Science Foundation/Digital Government program mangager Lawrence Brandt put it while scanning the animated discussions at the opening reception for Digital Government PIs, "I know it's a successful conference when I don't recognize half the people in this room. We have a lot of European visitors, a lot of people who are not currently funded by NSF but who came anyway, and a lot of new PIs I haven't met yet. "

This year's conference delved deeper into topics that were just coming out of workshop and SGER explorations a year or so ago: with a keynote address from U.S. D.O.T. e-rulemaker Neil Eisner and an entire session dedicated to e-rulemaking research on both the social science and intormation technology sides of the discipline, the conference thoroughly explored the tricky business of transforming legislation into laws with the guidance of an ever-more-vocal public.

University of Pittsburgh researcher Stuart Shulman, in presenting highlights of a project on "Language Processing for Election Technologies for e-Rulemaking," offered this sobering case study of the challenges faced by e-government practitioners: A recent proposed change in EPA laws regarding mercury pollution drew 530,000 comments - most of them driven by the huge amount of participation seen in recent years insocio-political networking and activism websites such as MoveOn.org and SierraClub.org. The flood of comments - some of which amounted to little more than machine-distributed, citizen-triggered spam - created 1.8 gigabytes of comment text (representing a 2.7-ton stack of paper 214 feet high) that the EPA had to review thoroughly while considering the change, Shulman said.

Another emerging theme was the sincere need of government agencies for more active research-community participation in solving larger problems for which software vendors only claim to offer solutions:

George S. Ake, Jr., presented an invited demonstration of the CapWIN system - a wireless emergency communications network for first-responders in Washington, DC. At the end of his demo, he implored the DG community to help solve problems that agencies are encountering with system interoperability, data sharing and application development - and quickly made contact with several scientists interested in collaborating.

A panel on Tuesday morning explored the progress that Digital Government research has made in defining itself as a discipline, its role in the Academy and its future potential as a curriculum. Several of the panelists noted the growth in prevalence and application of Digital Government research, and Judith Klavans of the University of Maryland said that while it may not be ready for prime time as a fully-fledged academic discipline, Digital Government can function as focus for other disicplines - DG in computer science, dg in policy science and so forth.

The lively demos- and- posters session offered intimate views of the latest IT research and policy scholarship underway in the Digital Government community

On Wednesday morning, keynote speaker Daniel E. Atkins of the University of Michigan outlined the challenges facing the Digital Government community as the national (and international) cyberinfrastructure initiatives launched a few years ago by the National Science Foundation begin to shape and capitalize on the growth of IT in the realms of knowledge, study and practice.

Atkins described some of influential government initiatives already under way: the Collaboratory, the Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence, Digital Libraries, the powerful GRID distributed computing network and the NSF Information Technology Research initiative, among others.

"There is a growing consensus, at least in many scientific communities, that the integration of IT-based services into an advanced common - or at least interoperable - infrastructure has the potential to revolutionize the conduct of research and allied education," Atkins told the audience. Making pervasive cyberinfrastructure work across all sectors of higher education will require extraordinary collaboration and planning, he said.

"It involves architecture and processes that identify and exploit commonality and accommodate heterogeneity through middleware and open standards," he concluded. "It includes the shared creation and re-use of software , information, facilities and best practices to promote cost effectiveness and efficiency. It requires a tight coupling between R&D in computer and information science, appropriate social and behavioral disciplines and pioneering application areas."

He concluded, "Perhaps our biggest common need is to work together to build broad constituencies for gaining the new investments recommended in (the NSF cyberinfrastructure report) for the technical and social resesarch necessary to create and apply cyberinfrastructure in principled ways, to innovation in both our science and our governance - both critical to our collective future."

Georgia Tech's Hao Wu demonstrates a system sending real-time video from a moving car over a wireless network.

At the same time that these larger influences are shaping Digital Government research, the technologies and best practices under development by DG researchers are showing remarkable maturity, as seen in the presentations, posters and system demonstrations throughout the conference.

The community's maturity and commitment to the discipline is also evident in the conference's steady rate of attendance,- particularly by a growing number of participants who are not NSF-funded PIs, and thus not required to come to dg.o, said Yigal Arens, the conference's financial chair.

"I was concerned that we would see a drop in attendance, but we have the same number of participans this year as last year and year before," said Arens, of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, who helped found the conference series. "This means we're getting more and more people who are coming not just because the NSF is paying their way and but because they seem to think it's an important place to be. That's gratifying."

Another gratifying sign of growth this year is the greater number of projects that have come to fruition or presented new results, says Genevieve Giuliano of the University of Southern California, who served as conference co-chair.

"I think that there are more results, and people have more to say about their results," Giuliano said. "I think the conference is going very well."

"It keeps growing every year, which is really pleasing," Brandt said. "We keep adding new elements, the international workshops and the tutorials are new this year - and every year it gets smoother, it gets much more interesting. ... If I had nothing to do with it, I'd still come here - there are so many people excited about what they're doing, and so many connections to be made."