The emergence of social media, open government, big data, and ICT-based forms of public participation, transparency and accountability hold promise for improving democratic processes and tackling intractable societal problems. Thanks to these trends, more sources, kinds, and amounts of information are infused into public interactions and policy decisions. However, these same technological and data-driven forces are significantly challenging traditional forms of governance, policy analysis, and service design. To address these challenges, we need a new kind of collaboration between research and practice and across academic disciplines. This situation presents both challenges and opportunities:

• the problems of ICT-supported policy making and governance are multi-faceted and therefore multidisciplinary
• these problems occur world-wide and therefore encompass different cultural approaches to research, development, and application
• the problems are both social and technical and thus demand integrated efforts across disciplines to develop and deploy innovative approaches and tools that are usable in practice settings.

CTG is involved in cultivating a new community of inquiry and practice (CoIP) within the public policy research and management arena, which is coming to be known as policy informatics. The goal of policy informatics is to find effective ways to use information and computation to understand and tackle complex problems of society. This goal demands not only new tools and methods, but a re-alignment of interests and relationships within the academic community and across research, education, and practice.