The White House and the National Archives and Records Administration is hosting a Summit on Smart Disclosure. This Summit is the first government-wide event to discuss current work and best practices, bringing together key stakeholders representing philanthropy, academia, consumer groups, and the nonprofit sector. The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Task Force on Smart Disclosure has been working to promote better disclosure policies and aid in the timely release of complex information in standardized, machine-readable formats that enable consumers to make informed decisions in numerous domains.
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Theresa Pardo has been invited to participate at the OECD High-level Meeting on E-government: New ICT Solutions for Public Sector Agility, hosted by the Mexican Public Administration Ministry. Pardo will moderate the opening session on Leveraging ICTs for advancing public policy objectives, which will focus on the challenges faced by e-leaders and explore options for national approaches and strategies embracing the use of new technologies. Since 2003, OECD has held a series of e-leaders meetings and seminars to provide the most senior government officials responsible for e-government in OECD member countries a forum for political and strategic exchange of opinions among peers on questions of common interest.
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The Forum's IT Corporate Roundtable provides a productive context for IT corporations and Forum membership to pursue proactive communications and initiatives targeted on improved mutual understandings and communications and, ultimately, more efficient state procedures, products and services better aligned with New York State needs. Theresa Pardo and Meghan Cook are presenting at their Roundtable Workgroup Meeting to give background on CTG, showcase a couple of our projects (that started as theory/prototypes and are now in operation) and suggest ideas of ways the corporate community can be part of CTG's network.
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The School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and School of Government (SOG) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) is holding a day-long symposium called Government Bits: Stewardship of Public Information in a Changing Digital Landscape. Themes of the day will include challenges in the stewardship of electronic records; current solutions for digital records environments; moving from a paper-based environment to a digital environment; information stewardship strategies for public administrators; and building information systems for information stewardship. The panel discussions and other interactive sessions will relate to lessons and strategies for professionals to engage in public information stewardship.
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Jana Hrdinova 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. After the training, Jana will spend an additional two days at the e-Governance Center of Moldova working with them on social media guidelines.
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The World Bank and the e-Governance Center of Moldova are jointly sponsoring Moldova Open Government Day. Theresa Pardo will present on the U.S experience with open government; other speakers include Andrew Stott from the UK Transparency Board, Daniel Dietrich from the Open Knowledge Foundation, and many more participants representating civil society (NGO); data journalism; academia, donors and leading government representatives.The first part of the day is geared towards helping Moldova finalize its draft National Open Government Action Plan in preparation to joining the Open Government Partnership. The second part, a Seminar on Open Budget Data, will be livecast at 10 am EST. This session will focus on Moldova's use of BOOST, a new tool developed by the World Bank to help its client countries in their efforts to enhance budget spending transparency.
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As part of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, all federal agencies are required to submit an updated version of their Open Government Plan to the White House by April 2012. In meeting this requirement, the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) is using CTG's Open Government Portfolio Public Value Assessment Tool (PVAT) to maximize the impact of their open government portfolio. Meghan Cook analyzed the public value assessments of 11 proposed USDOT initiatives to be included in their updated plan and presented findings to the Agency’s Open Government Executive Steering Committee (OGESG). The committee will use this information for decision making about their Flagship Initiative and will incorporate the public value findings in their updated Open Government Plan.
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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 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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To meet the requirement of having an updated version of their Open Government Plan, the US DOT is using CTG's Open Government Portfolio Public Value Assessment Tool (PVAT) to conduct a value analysis on their proposed initiatives. Over the course of two days, Cook is leading agency teams in workshops so that they can conduct a public value analysis on their initiatives. CTG will analyze results of all the public value assessments and present findings to 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 CTG graduate assistants (Djoko Sigit Sayogo and Taewoo Nam) 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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Held annually, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management's international research conferences attract the best researchers from around the world and covers topical issues in the public policy community. The Fudan University School of International Relations and Public Affairs (SIRPA), the University of Maryland School of Public Policy (UMD), and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) are hosting this year's conference, entitled Collaboration Among Government, Market, and Society: Forging Partnerships and Encouraging Competition. Sharon Dawes will present the paper, Collaboration across Nations: Context and Dynamics, coauthored by Brian Burke and Lei Zheng (Fudan University). The paper focuses on the interactions among the participants during the six-year engagement that culminated in the implementation of AIRNow-I Shanghai, with particular attention to the ways in which their work was influenced by the need to deal with important contextual distances associated with culture, language, organizational factors, data, knowledge, and technology.
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The 2013 Major Cities of Europe Annual Conference will focus on "ICT:Fostering Cities' Prosperity.” The annual conference brings together local government managers and CIOs with leading experts in the ICT field to identify innovative solutions for the most pressing challenges cities face today. Meghan Cook will be a Track Chair both facilitating and speaking in the session, DATA: Leveraging a City’s Goldmine. The session will feature presentations and a roundtable from cities and public service ICT companies focused on maximizing a goldmine of data to promote new services, participation, economic development, societal changes.
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The 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2013) will focus on the theme, From e-Government to Smart Government. Natalie Helbig and Theresa Pardo are Track Chairs, Teresa Harrison and Jana Hrdinova are Panel Chairs, and Sharon Dawes and J. Ramon Garcia are co-chairs of the Doctoral Colloquium. Natalie, Theresa, Teresa, Sharon, and Ramon are also on the Program Committee. The dg.o meetings are an established forum for the presentation, discussion, and demonstration of interdisciplinary digital government research, technology innovation, applications, and practice. This year's conference is hosted by the Faculty of Business Administration at Laval University. Paper submissions are due February 1, 2013.
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