Aug 2011 >Download PDF

AIRNow-International (AIRNow-I) is an initiative led by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to redesign the US air quality monitoring and public reporting system to be scalable, interoperable, portable, and affordable to any country. Its guiding vision is a readily usable worldwide platform for sharing air quality information to improve public health. This case study assesses the internationalization of AIRNow through the lens of a collaborative project between EPA and the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center (SEMC) in China. We trace the history of air quality policy and management in both countries and then explore the structure and dynamics of their joint effort to build AIRNow-I Shanghai. This report describes the influences of the separate Chinese and American contexts on the participants and their interactions, and identifies the ways in which they bridged many types of contextual distances to produce successful results.

Feb 2010 >Download PDF

Information, Technology, and Governance: A Grand Challenges Research Agenda was a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation to craft a multi-year research program to address the grand challenges of government and governance in an environment of rapidly evolving social and technical change. The key event in the project was a workshop that brought together leaders from social and information science research and government to explore these grand challenge questions and develop a next generation research agenda, with a particular focus on socio-organizational contexts. The Pre-Workshop Paper was used to introduce the ideas behind the workshop and spur discussion on the issues.

Dec 2009 >Download PDF

In response to growing interest in and concerns about social media in the public sector among government professionals, CTG launched a project aimed at exploring some of the issues and benefits connected with social media tools. This report summarizes results from two workshops held with government professionals from New York State (NYS) as part of this project. The workshops were designed to collect information on the value NYS agencies seek in their current or future use of social media, as well as their most pressing questions and concerns regarding that use. The report summarizes the results from workshops, with full results provided in three apendices, and concludes with a section outlining the next steps in the project.

Oct 2009 >Download PDF

This report describes how a diverse mix of individuals and organizations representing two countries, three states, multiple levels of government, private industry, academia, and the public were able to successfully organize and then respond to improve air quality along the U.S. and Mexican border. The focal point of this study is the Joint Advisory Committee for the Improvement of Air Quality in the Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas/Doña Ana County, New Mexico Air Basin (the JAC). It was through the JAC that this diverse mix of key actors were able to navigate the complex web of political, cultural, legal, and economic factors that posed challenges to developing a unified response to this shared air quality problem. The JAC’s strategies and methods were powerfully shaped by the characteristics of the physical setting and the organizational and political context. Many of these strategies and methods have considerable promise for other air shed regions, but must be tailored to the unique physical and social situations of each one.

Proceedings of 5th International Conference on e-Government, Oct 2009, pp.148-155
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Research has shown that clarity of roles and responsibilities (CRR) influences the effectiveness and performance of individual organizations as well as cross-boundary or interorganizational group efforts. Role clarity increases job satisfaction, commitment, and involvement and reduces tension and anxiety among organizational members, which results in lower staff turnover rates in organizations. In addition, CRR has been found to enable other important determinants of success in cross-boundary information sharing (CBI), such as building trust among members of CBI initiatives. However, few studies attempt to understand the determinants of CRR in a CBI initiative. Using data from semi-structured interviews from eight U.S. state and local government public health and criminal justice information sharing cases, this paper seeks to fill this gap by examining these determinants.

This is an electronic version of an Article published in Public Administration Review, Volume 69, Issue 3 (p 392-402), © 2009 the American Society for Public Administration, May 2009
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Public managers confront tangled problems every day across all policy domains and levels of government, and they need to be ready to deal with them through networked forms of engagement and action. Knowledge networking—the ability to create public sector knowledge networks (PSKNs) suitable for addressing these problems—requires a certain set of skills and attitudes, as well as interpersonal and other kinds of trust. Network development processes that emphasize early, open dialogue and examination of assumptions and expectations do better than those that rush forward with a fixed IT solution in mind. Those that adapt and learn from experience are more likely to succeed in achieving their substantive project and networking goals. Finally, to be sustainable as organizational forms, knowledge networks need some legal foundation, access to resources, supportive policies, and innovative forms of leadership.