As part of a six month project to assist the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) in their pursuit of a more open government and vibrant economy, Theresa Pardo will be presenting project results and recommendations to senior level ministers, ICT staff, civil society representatives, and industry leaders. With funding from The World Bank and the Korean Partnership Trust, CTG, as lead partner in the Open Government Alliance, is assisting the FGN to be more transparent, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance as a way to move towards a more open government. As part of this work, Theresa Pardo and Meghan Cook, program manager at CTG, travelled to Abuja, Nigeria to conduct a series of working meetings and workshops in late 2012 and early 2013.

Donna Canestraro and Megan Sutherland will be speaking at the NY State Local Government IT Directors Association's (NYSLGITDA) spring conference. They will be highlighting CTG's broadband work with New York State and giving updates on the launch of the redesigned broadband speedtest website and ongoing efforts to collect broadband information from New York's community anchor institutions (CAI). CTG has been reaching out to the county IT directors for assistance in collecting the CAI data. NYSLGITDA is dedicated to the coordination and improvement of information technology in all types of governments in New York State.
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The Governance Lab @ NYU is organizing a new kind of event that will bring together activists and researchers, industry designers and technologists, as well as academic, government, civil society and business leaders to design concrete methods through which institutions can reinvent themselves and citizens can organize themselves and engage response. Theresa Pardo has been invited to collaborate as part of this group of leaders who are willing to implement ground-breaking interventions and interested in engaging citizens in the process of governance. This event, Building a Research and Design Infrastructure: A Technology for Engagement Summit is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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The IT Leadership Academy is a Government Technology event designed by and for government senior technology executives, and senior managers being groomed for leadership. The two day program features state leaders, well-known experts in leadership and technology, and topics of current interest. The Academy provides New York state and local government technology leaders a chance to sharpen their business skills and network with each other and industry leaders. At the 2013 Academy, Meghan Cook will moderate a panel session on Building Transparency though Citizen Engagement, Social Media, and Open Data. This session will leverage knowledge and expertise from public, private, nonprofit, and education institutions already engaged in open government initiatives and open your eyes, as an IT Leader, to what is possible. Showcasing a collection of expertise and real examples (including Super Storm Sandy and New York State's Open Data initiatives), experts will detail efforts in opening government, opening government data, engaging citizens, and leveraging social media - all with the goal of increasing transparency.
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CTG and collaborators will coordinate a panel of papers that focuses on the emerging role of policy informatics in supporting public policy and governance at the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) annual conference. Hosted in Prague, Czech Republic, the 2013 conference is expected to bring together academics and practitioners from different world regions addressing issues related to the topic of the conference.
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The Forum brings together the brightest minds and the latest solutions in the eGovernment arena with a focus on the private sector. Prominent international speakers will share their visions, experiences and future forecasts regarding e-Government technologies and innovations from across the world.
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Jana Hrdinova will be a guest lecturer for the class, Planning for Jobs, Housing & Community Services in Third World Cities, taught by Corianne P. Scally, Ph.D. Assistant Professor and Co-Director of UAlbany's Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning Program. Jana's lecture will focus on the issues surrounding government use of technology in developing countries. The Master's program provides education for professional planning practice, to research and publish on planning-related issues, and to apply planning methods to improve the quality of life in communities and regions.
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The Sabadell Smart Congress is a unique meeting point for advanced thinking over the smart cities of the future. Recognized speakers from national and international spheres will give their views on the city in all its dimensions: economy, energy, environment, social welfare, technology and governance. Presentations, roundtables and exhibits will show and directly apply technologically based R&D from multinationals and small creative entrepreneurs. Donna Canestraro will participate at the session SMART SAFETY: Innovating in health care services to improve citizens quality of life.
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Jana Hrdinová and Djoko Sigit Sayogo (PhD student at Rockefeller College & graduate assistant at CTG), jointly presented with team members from CCI/UAlbany and Tetherless World Constellation/RPI: Semantic Web Development Methodology in Practice: The iChoose Ontology as a Use Case at RPI as part of Ontology Summit 2013. In addition, they are holding a Ontology Summit Hackathon Clinic at RPI this Saturday also based on the iChoose project.
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The tGov (Transforming Government) Workshop 2013 is organized by the Information Systems Evaluation and Integration Group (ISEing) to provide a common platform for academics and practitioners to discuss and present original research highlighting issues related with technical, organisational, managerial and socioeconomic aspects of both (e) and (t)-Government implementation and adoption. Sharon Dawes is participating in the workshop as a member of the eGovPoliNet Consortium, which is collaborating with tGov 2013 in organizing a set of presentation and panel discussions to bring together researchers and practitioners to present their approaches on ICT for governance and policy modelling.
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The objective of the 1st Regional Technology and Social Networking Forum is to bring together leading scholars, authorities, practitioners and experts to discuss emerging trends and future opportunities of technology and social networking, and its economic impact on the region. Jana Hrdinova will be speaking on social media policies and guidelines for governments.
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Theresa Pardo will give a talk on Information Sharing, Emergency Response and Homeland Security: Lessons from the Field at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The talk will be a snapshot of the field and a primer focusing on the challenges of emergency response to large scale events such as Hurricane Sandy, which increasingly fall into the realm of data sharing, communications, and computing. The recent recognition of “Big Data” -- the massive quantities of electronic information stored from myriad sources across our society -- and their productive use via analytics to improve the timeliness and quality of applied decisions, will be discussed.
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The main theme of the MENA ICT Forum™ 2013 is Arab ICT Spring: Realizing Potential. The Forum features a content-rich agenda that covers vital current and future issues related to regional investment climates, legislative supportive systems, infrastructure & communications, emerging technologies, as well as education and human capital development. In particular, the Forum addresses these issues in a context that is highly relevant to the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, thus providing the business community, decision makers and stakeholders with a holistic overview of the region’s current position, opportunities on hand and recommended approach for leveraging its potential. Sharon Dawes will be on a panel discussing ICTs in government.
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The ICT Solutions Day is a day-long session where client countries and internal and external experts will come together to get hands-on experience on developing Smart Solutions using information and communications technologies (ICT) to tackle development challenges. This event will be centered around leveraging the best global thinking to explore the power of collective intelligence and the latest technology enablers to co-create smart solutions across the sectors. Theresa Pardo and Meghan Cook will participate as expert discussants to engage participating countries in design thinking – a client-driven, open, collaborative process of building up meaningful ICT-enabled solutions that will address the challenges in a new way.
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The Transatlantic Research on Policy Modeling Workshop aims to collect and share knowledge on sectorial and integrated modeling frameworks, as well as on best practice applications, for policy formulation and evaluation through the application of modeling techniques in the form of innovative ICT tools. Sharon Dawes will be on the panel Bridging science, policy and technology: challenges and opportunities. The workshop is being organized by the Millennium Institute as part of the FP7 EU co-funded CROSSOVER Project to provide a common discussion ground for modelers, policy analysts and decision makers on the current state of modeling efforts and to inform decision-making on available tools and on critical policy decisions, ultimately also contributing strongly to the CROSSOVER Roadmap on Policy Modeling 2.0.
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The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is one of the longest-standing continuously running scientific conferences. At HICSS46, 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. Sharon Dawes is one of the leaders of the full day symposium session on Four Years of Open Government: An Appraisal.
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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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