Two activities helped set the stage for the workshop. During the summer, the organizing committee issued a call for papers addressing the themes of the workshop. A variety of academic researchers, private consultants, and government practitioners responded; from the submissions, 18 papers from a variety of perspectives were selected to serve as a backdrop for the workshop. These were made available on the workshop Web site for the participants to examine before the workshop. Several authors were invited to attend or make presentations at the workshop. In a second activity, the workshop organizers conducted a review of award- winning government applications to identify exemplary uses of IT in government that could serve to underscore the "program-centric" theme of the workshop. From this group of several dozen programs, a total of six were selected for presentation at the workshop. These served as examples of the range and depth of uses of IT at all three levels of government.

The workshop organizing committee then invited additional participants to represent a broad mixture of stakeholders: government officials and managers from Federal, state, and local levels; researchers from a variety of fields including social, information, computer, and computational science; and representatives from the private sector, nonprofit organizations, and the international government IT community. Altogether, a total of 67 people participated in the workshop.