Welcome to the Digital Government Homepage

This project entitled Modeling Online Participation in Local Governance is funded by the National Science Foundation (IIS-0429274) Digital Government Program (September 1, 2004 - August 31, 2007). It is led by the Center for Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, in collaboration with Montgomery County, and the Town of Blacksburg. Please see the Project Summary.

Principal Investigators: Andrea Kavanaugh, Philip Isenhour, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Daniel Dunlap
Outside Consultants: John M. Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Joseph Schmitz
Current Graduate Research Assistants and affiliated Graduate Researchers: Sameer Ahuja, B. Joon Kim, Candida Tauro
(Former Research Assistants and affiliated Researchers: Uma Murthy, Spencer Lee, Hyung Nam Kim, Jaideep Godara, Alain Fabian, Will Randolph, Matt Stover, Andrew Mike, Matthew Cooper, Anshul Midha, Salahaldin Hussein, and research associate, Dr. Than Than Zin).

Project Goals:

  • To understand how citizens use information technology with each other to participate in civic life (find information, stay informed, discuss issues, form opinions, deliberate);
  • To understand how online citizen-to-citizen deliberation links back into local government decision making;
  • To improve the capability and functionality of information technology to serve the interests and needs of citizens and local government.

Our project seeks to re-focus the digital government discussion around factors that make for an effective democracy rather than for effective government. We focus on citizen participation in local governance ?especially, local voluntary associations -- and on better ways that technology can support and facilitate the involvement of citizens and groups (from all strata of a community) in local governance.

Project Activities:

  • Literature Review (see Papers link)
  • Data Collection (interviews, telephone surveys, focus groups, requirements analysis, web logs)
  • Tools modification and prototyping
  • Testbed (restricted)
  • Links to blogs about digital democracy, related research and initiatives

Links to Digital Government Research/Resources

The National Science Foundation Digital Government Program built a broad array of tools, resources and events that may be of use to researchers; these are now maintained by the Digital Government Society.

  • The National Conference on Digital Government Research convenes annually. The 2007 Digital Government conference will be held in Philadelphia, May 20-23.
  • The Digital Government Society maintains a library and archives of digital government research and database of DG projects that were formerly maintained by the University of Southern California.
  • The DG Society publishes a regular newsletter of digital government research. Published via email, dgOnline covers a broad array of topics related to Digital Government research, government IT and public policy news.