As part of the White House Open Government Initiative, all federal agencies are required to develop an updated version of their Open Government Plan by April 2012. In working to meet this requirement, the United States Department of Transportation (US DOT) is using CTG's Open Government Portfolio Public Value Assessment Tool (PVAT) to conduct a public value analysis of their proposed initiatives. Using a group decision making process, CTG will work with US DOT to help them through a series of working sessions and discussions to identify the initiatives that yield the most public value. Information generated during this process will inform decision making by the agency's Open Government Executive Steering Committee.
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Theresa Pardo has been invited to moderate a panel of experts who will focus on examining issues surrounding diplomacy and technology, including trends in social media communication, the impact of new technology on the conduct of foreign relations, and how government uses new technology to effectively promote their interests. Panelists are Phillip J. Crowley, Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs; General Garry D. Raduege, Jr., Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Cyber Innovation; Mr. Eugene Roman, Chief Technology Officer, Open Text; Dr. Janice Stein, Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. This event is a joint venture presented by the Consulate General of Canada in New York in conjunction with the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the Province of Ontario, and the State University of New York and will take place at the SUNY Global Center.
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Sharon Dawes is meeting with various agencies in Shanghai to discuss transnational cooperation and information access. Dawes will be meeting with officials from the Shanghai Information Center and Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center, as well with CTG's partners at Fudan University. The meetings are, in part, a follow up to CTG's Understanding Transnational Public Sector Knowledge Networks project, which produced a case study assessing a collaborative project between the US EPA and the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center.

The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is one of the longest-standing continuously running scientific conferences. At HICSS45, Theresa Pardo is serving as mini-track co-chair of Emerging Topics in the Electronic Government Track, which takes a look at new topics and trends that are emerging in e-Government. Pardo and several CTG graduate students will also present papers on Understanding Smart Cities: An Integrative Framework; Building the Academic Community of E-Government Research on Cross-Boundary Information Integration and Sharing; and Exploring the Motive for Data Publication in Open Data Initiative: Linking Intention to Action.
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The 2012 Winter ESIP Federation Meeting will focus on the theme: Connections Through Collaboration: Engaging Community Throughout the Data Life Cycle. With increasing attention being paid to data systems interoperability both within and across science disciplines, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) plays an important role in bringing together organizations and individuals who make the connections - both human and technical - necessary to achieve integrated science. Brian Burke, along with Dan Ferguson, University of Arizona will lead the hands-on Evaluation Workshop: A Framework for Project Evaluation, which will focus on 1) why one evaluates data and their associated enabling technologies for discovery and distribution and 2) some basic methods for getting started with evaluating the impact of your own research or products. Burke will introduce CTG's Public Value Framework and how it uses the concept of public value to help government and those that work with government understand the tangible and intangible values that information can provide to multiple and often diverse stakeholders.
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The World Bank Institute is holding a virtual dialogue onOpening Up Development:How Can Countries Start and Run Open Data Ecosystems? The event will feature personal reflections from leaders in Kenya and Moldova-two countries that have successfully embarked upon an Open Data agenda. Following these reflections, Theresa Pardo will join in a panel discussion on the importance of developing Open Government Data Ecosystems for the success of Open Government initiatives. Participants worldwide can join the discussion via video conference, live webcast and Twitter: #opendta.
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Meghan Cook will participate at the European Commission-sponsored event on Transparency and Openness. This ePractice workshop will aim to address the subject of transparency and openness of governments relating to their interaction with citizens. Meghan will give a presentation on A Public Value Approach to Open Government Planning - How to Plan and Measure When Traditional ROI Isn't Enough and then participate in a round table discussion.
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CTG is part of an international research team that has received a grant to build the capacity of graduate students as international researchers and to develop a framework for smart cities service integration. Theresa Pardo and Taewoo Nam, a CTG graduate assistant and doctoral candidate in Public Administration at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, will be attending the third working group meeting, held at the Information School, University of Washington, Seattle. The whole team will be jointly refining a scheme to categorize the qualitative data from semi-structured interviews in each city and discussing the issues of inter-rater reliability in coding the interview data. Also, Theresa and Taewoo will be presenting preliminary findings from interviews with the City of Philadelphia government's executives and managers of its core programs (Philly311, PhillyRising, and PhillyStat) to improve city services, government operation, and communities.
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As part of their annual training meeting, CTG has been invited to present our work on social media policy, public value thinking, and smart cities during a session on Information Technology a transformative agent for local government. CTG presenters will be Theresa Pardo, Meghan Cook, and Natalie Helbig. The Association is a professional organization of appointed chief executive officers and administrators, other appointed municipal officials and educators dedicated to the improvement of local government and the quality of urban life.
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CTG will be delivering a two-day training course for government professionals from Moldova on managing social media use in a government context. The training is financed by the U.S. Department of State.

The I-Choose project team is focusing on creating information interoperability among stakeholder communities for the single case of coffee grown in Mexico, and distributed and consumed in Canada and the United States. The second network meeting of these stakeholders will focus on: collecting feedback on the proposed content and design of the interoperable I-Choose system; and obtaining expert feedback from participants on the existing policy and technical obstacles to the proposed system.
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CTG staff will participate at the 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2012), Bridging Research and Practice. The dg.o meetings are an established forum for the presentation, discussion, and demonstration of interdisciplinary digital government research, technology innovation, applications, and practice. Theresa Pardo, Sharon Dawes, Natalie Helbig, and Teresa Harrision are serving on the 2012 Program Committee. Sharon Dawes will co-chair the Doctoral Colloquim, along with Dr Bjoern Niehaves of the University of Muenster and Dr. Jochen Scholl of the University at Washington. The Doctoral Colloquium is a full-day forum in which Ph.D. students meet and discuss their work with each other and with senior faculty from a variety of disciplines associated with digital government research.
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The IFIP eGovernment Conference 2012 will bring together the top of the scientific research community in e-government and e-governance from all over the world. The conference provides a highly interactive and professional forum for exchanging research concepts, progress and results. As in the past, IFIP EGOV will feature refereed paper presentations, invited keynote presentations, high-level discussion panels, workshops, and a PhD Colloquium. Sharon Dawes is co-chair of the PhD Colloquium, along with Björn Niehaves, European Research Center for Information Systems, Germany, and Jochen Scholl, University of Washington.
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CTG will be host to the 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2012). This year’s conference is expected to bring together 300 practitioners, developers and researchers from government, local municipalities, academia, industry and civil society from over 50 countries from all over the world. One of the key themes of ICEGOV 2012 will be organized around the Open Government Partnership (OGP), and the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies. Taking place a year after the launch of the OGP, ICEGOV 2012 will be positioned for participants throughout the world to come together to share knowledge, discuss efforts of the OGP participating countries, as well as share challenges and lessons learned.
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