Teresa M. Harrison

University at Albany, State University of New York | UAlbany · Department of Communication

The government “enterprise” consists of a complex set of organizations with a multitude of goals and values, serving an equally diverse group of constituents. Because of this complexity, governing technology and data to support Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability has proven to be a difficult task that –according to experts– requires a systems p...

Beyond the complex logistical task of prioritizing, distributing and safely storing millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines, state and local governments must simultaneously devise and carry out transparent plans that center equity and overcome the barriers to vaccination facing minority communities. Using insights gleaned from four focus groups cond...

The Internet and Web 2.0 have created novel forms of collective action and political participation, the dynamics of which have attracted considerable scholarly attention. E-petitioning, a genre of technology-based collective action tools, makes it possible for members of the public to address government decision makers directly with their requests...

While there is growing consensus that the analytical and cognitive tools of artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to transform government in positive ways, it is also clear that AI challenges traditional government decision-making processes and threatens the democratic values within which they are framed. These conditions argue for conser...

In spring 2020, New York City became the acknowledged epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. To keep residents informed, Governor Cuomo conducted a streak of 111 daily press briefings reporting critical information about the status of the pandemic in the State at large, and New York City in particular. We show that through these b...

We describe the experience of a sample of US state child welfare organizations that are implementing, or deciding to transition, to a new model of information system, now explicitly recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services of the US Federal Government. The new Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System was intended to replace...

Technical and organizational innovations such as Open Data, Internet of Things and Big Data have fueled renewed interest in policy analytics in the public sector. This revamped version of policy analysis continues the long-standing tradition of applying statistical modeling to better understand policy effects and decision making, but also incorpora...

Citizen journalism" is a term used to refer to ordinary individuals who act as journalists during some part of the process of creating content for mainstream journalism coverage. In China, besides ordinary citizen journalists, some professional journalists have been regarded as citizen journalists if they write stories online that would otherwise n...

GitHub is a popular source code hosting and development service that supports distributed teams working on large and small software projects, particularly open-source projects. According to Wikipedia, as of April 2017 GitHub supports more than 20 million users and more than 57 million repositories. In addition to version control and code updates fu...

In this panel, scholars discuss involving data, computational analysis, and information technology that has the potential to present ethical quandaries in the course of decision making related to digital government. More specifically, the presentations focus on algorithm-based decision making, personally identifiable information, and the manipulati...

We describe the experience of a sample of US state child welfare agencies currently deciding whether to transition to a new model of information system, now explicitly recommended by the US federal government. The new model is inspired by enterprise-level data intensive thinking and promises to enable states to design systems that complement state...

To contribute to the development of policy informatics, we discuss the benefits of analyzing electronic petitions (e-petitions), a form of citizen-government discourse with deep historic roots that has recently transitioned into a technologically-enabled and novel form of political communication. We begin by presenting a rationale for the analysis...

E-petitioning, a genre of technology-based collective action tools, makes it possible for members of the public to address government decision makers directly with their requests for action. In this paper we use time series analysis to explore the effects of Twitter and other forms of online media on the accumulation of signatures in e-petitioning....

E-petitioning is a ubiquitous form of online political action that has emerged as a contemporary and potentially effective way for citizens to communicate with their governments about policy issues and that makes public participation in policy discussions more easily accessible. We argue that e-petitioning platforms generate novel types of data and...

Purpose In this paper, the authors compare the open government data (OGD) ecosystems of Mexico, Russia and the USA in an effort to extract some of the major points of similarity and differentiation between these countries and to trace how variations in these ecosystems may be related to context-specific historical problems and politics, particular...

E-petitioning technology platforms elicit the participation of citizens in the policy-making process but at the same time create large volumes of unstructured textual data that are difficult to analyze. Fortunately, computational tools can assist policy analysts in uncovering latent patterns from these large textual datasets. This study uses such c...

Many cities across the globe have begun to implement smart city initiatives in order to create a more interconnected, efficient, responsive, and cost-effective set of operations and services. This panel seeks to present lessons from both research and practice on building and sustaining smarter cities, offering perspectives and insights on the diffe...

This panel presents research from four projects exploring e-government in China currently under development by doctoral students in the information science and the communication programs at the University at Albany. Some of the projects reflect topics and themes that are of traditional interest, while others focus on topics that are more novel but...

The rights of citizens to petition their governments has had a long history and is currently experiencing an interesting revival through the use of contemporary digital platforms that many countries are adopting to encourage e-participation. In this panel, speakers discuss national petitioning systems in four countries from historical and contempor...

Electronic petitions are a ubiquitous form of online political action directed at governments. Using a wide range of electronic petitioning platforms, individuals can request specific actions of their own government or governments of other countries, and gather support for their requests through the accumulation of signatures from supporters. While...

We compare the implementations and practices of open government and open government data in Mexico, Russia, and the US using a set of common concepts focused on policy environment and context. After providing thumbnail sketches of each country, we consider how variations among the countries are relate to context-specific historical problems, polici...

This study aims to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of the political mobilization of online ''communities''. We discuss the case of We the People, a US national experiment in the use of social media technology to enable users to propose and solicit support for policy suggestions to the White House. We apply Baum...

DOI: 10.1145/2757401.2757421 Citation: Hagen, L., Harrison, T. M., Uzuner, Ö., Fake, T., LaManna, D., & Kotfila, C. (2015). Introducing Textual Analysis Tools for Policy Informatics: A Case Study of E-petitions. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. Electronic petitioning (e-petitioning) provi...

Electronic petitioning (e-petitioning) provides a unique and promising channel through which people can directly express their policy preferences. E-petitions may be viewed as a natural laboratory for determining subjects of public interest, and thus can be used by policy analysts to understand social needs and constraints. In this paper, we introd...

In this study, we aim to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of political mobilization of online " communities " in the case of We the People (WtP), the first web-enabled petitioning system developed by the US federal government. This Internet-based tool enables users to petition the Obama Administration and solici...

The pdf file attached is "the accepted version." The final paper copyrighted by IEEE is published in this url: http://conferences.computer.org/hicss/2015/papers/7367c134.pdf Hagen, L., Uzuner, O., Kotfila, C., Harrison, T. M., & Lamanna, D. (2015). Understanding Citizens’ Direct Policy Suggestions to the Federal Government: A Natural Language Pro...

This study extends the central part of the risk information seeking and processing model to examine how message elaboration influences individuals’ support for climate change mitigation policy and their intention to engage in pro-environmental behavior. Data were collected through online experimental surveys at two large universities in the Northea...

"Big data" has captured the imagination of e-government researchers as the source of potential advances in government innovation, strategy, and policy, and as the basis for entirely new approaches to research investigations across the disciplines. Digital data is everywhere, and, it is thought, considerable value may be obtained in analyzing the di...

While there has been substantial interest in the idea of public value from an academic and theoretical perspective, governments often struggle with how to systematically incorporate public value thinking into their decision making practices. In this paper, we review the concept of public value and its use as an IT management strategy by public mana...

The potential positive impacts of open data and information sharing initiatives, along with their attendant challenges, have captured the attention and imagination of governments around the world, in both industrialized and developing countries. Government leaders in most countries are convinced that open data has the potential to increase cooperat...

This study applies the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model to examine how information processing influences individuals' support for climate change mitigation policy. Perceived issue salience, attitude toward climate information, and systematic processing are positively related to policy support, whereas heuristic processing is not...

Although disclosure is at the heart of transparency, simple disclosure does not begin to address more complicated questions about the qualitative nature of transparency and whether participation and accountability processes ensue. In this paper, we inquire about the socio-political conditions that are related to [a] qualitative aspects of budget tr...

The purpose of this panel is to explore the ways in which research produced within the e-government community may overlap with the interests of scholars in public administration and management and information science as represented by a variety of scholarly journals. Editors from three journals outside the normal province of publication for e-gover...

In this plenary panel, speakers from academia and government consider the technical, scientific, and organizational implications of Big Data and offer observations about what it means for research and practice related to e-government.

In a study of budgetary transparency and accountability, this chapter examines how a country's disclosure of budget information is related to a set of socio-political factors. The authors analyze data from the biennial Open Budget Survey conducted by the International Budget Partnership for the years of 2008 and 2010. The study compares three types...

In this paper, we propose to view the concept of open government from the perspective of an ecosystem, a metaphor often used by policy makers, scholars, and technology gurus to convey a sense of the interdependent social systems of actors, organizations, material infrastructures, and symbolic resources that can be created in technology-enabled, inf...

We argue that the Obama Administration's Open Government Initiative blurs distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices. now enabled by emerging technology. within administrative agencies. We consider the nature of transparency, participation. and collaboration. suggesting that these processes...

In this paper, we explore the relationship between Internet diffusion and other factors generally associated with democratic development, and transparency and accountability, as indicated by the online availability of budget information for a global sample of countries. We begin by defining transparency and reviewing research that has investigated...

Dans cet article, nous abordons la notion de transparence gouvernementale et sa portée générale sur l’avenir de l’administration publique dans un contexte de cybergouvernement. Nous soutenons que l’Open Government Initiative de l’actuelle administration américaine estompe les différences conventionnelles entre cyberdémocratie et cybergouvernement p...

We consider open government (OG) within the context of e-government and its broader implications for the future of public administration. We argue that the current US Administration's Open Government Initiative blurs traditional distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emer...

This article explores what is new about Web 2.0, the contemporary cutting-edge platform for web development, differentiating between what is celebrated in the discourse of Web 2.0 and what is genuinely novel about this phenomenon, which is users' propensity to construct content in the form of information and media products for the web environment....

While generally not recognized by e-government researchers, children and teens are an audience for web sites featuring information about the activities, services, or missions of numerous federal government organizations, and perhaps should be viewed as an audience for community information presented by municipal and county governments. This paper d...

Innovations in World Wide Web technology coupled with new developments in information design present both challenges and opportunities for the creation of e-government applications that are functional, engaging for users, and that enable the achievement of democratic goals. We review the affordances associated with Web 2.0 technologies and more rec...

Advocates of geographic information technologies (GIT) have long claimed significant advantages to bringing a spatially oriented perspective to bear on organizational and policy decision making, however, for a variety of reasons, these advantages have been more difficult to realize in practice than might be supposed. In this article, we argue that...

The Connected Kids research team has launched a working prototype of its youth-services information system and has further developed the prototype, adding customizable web pages, a document-entry function, and a new map interface and initiating development of additional search capabilities. To promote use of the system, we have provided support for...

Recent accounts of male and female personality development suggest that members of each sex differ in the orientations and capacities they bring to their experience of the political world. This article explores the relative importance of respondents’ images of the candidates and respondents’ political positions to predictions of males’ and females’...

Geographic information technologies (GIT) have the potential to integrate information among multiple organizations. In fact, some of the most impressive advantages of using geo-spatial data are derived from the power of bringing together geographic data covering territories that may well be administered by different organizations and from layering...

Research on user participation in computer applications, including digital-government applications, emphasizes the need to engage users as collaborators or partners in software-design processes. The Connected Kids youth-services information system for city and county government is a product of ongoing experiments in user-designer-programmer collabo...

New technologies make it feasible and, in many cases, practical for individuals, groups, and organizations to collaborate in the development of joint information systems. Users find collaborative information systems attractive because they make it possible to find information from diverse sources easily and efficiently. Such systems also make good...

This paper introduces a rationale for and approach to the study of sustainability in computerized community information systems. It begins by presenting a theoretical framework for posing questions about sustainability predicated upon assumptions from social construction of technology and adaptive structuration theories. Based in part on the litera...

Connected Kids (CK) is a web-accessible database application whose purpose is to disseminate information about activities and resources for youth in Troy, NY (hometown of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and surrounding Rensselaer County. Our principal partner in the design and implementation of this community information system has been Troy City...

Design of communication technologies such as our own effort to develop a youth-services information system for a local community, present practical problems in the collection and interpretation of data on users' needs and the development of design specifications responsive to these needs. Activity theory provides a conceptual framework for such a d...

Noting that communication technologies are built by human beings rather than constituting naturally occurring features of the environment, we argue that social researchers should become involved in the process of design and adopt an orientation toward inquiry based on the concept of phronesis. Phronesis focuses on questions of ethics and deliberati...

We have observed three prevalent trends in interface designs for searching and browsing. One, search is considered as a one step process where the user, in order to locate items of interest, needs to modify the query if dissatisfied with the retrieved results. Two, browsing is usually implemented as a static process that does not relate to the prev...

People mean many different things when they discuss democracy in the context of new technologies. How- ever, two relatively consistent themes focus on the ad- vantages that new technologies offer: (1) information democracy, ability to generate more, better informa- tion and distribute it to larger audiences, (2) improv- ing the operations of libera...

The communication discipline has harbored a long interest in the relationship between communication technology and democracy. In this review, we assess the literature addressing this relationship in the context of new communication technologies. We begin by exploring the way that causal claims have been conceptualized and go on to consider 5 “root...

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE ROLE OF electronic academic journals within scholarly communities. Scholarly communities are best understood as discourse communities which share symbol systems as well as conventions for communication. We discuss the ways in which the network and the electronic journals it hosts can play an important role in facilitating...

Comserve is an electronic information service for individuals in the field of human communication studies. One of the oldest and largest online disciplinary resources, Comserve has been in continuous operation on Bitnet/Internet and connected networks since 1986. Comserve provides online conferences, an electronic white pages for the discipline, a...

Despite its significance as a form of shared organizational knowledge, there have been few attempts to conceptualize or assess empirically the concept of organizational image or the content of organization members’ images of their organization. In this paper, qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis were used to assess o...

Until recently, research in organizational studies has tended to assume that interdependent relationships are patterned on the model of bureaucratic hierarchy. This essay explores two alternative models of interdependence found in democratic employee-owned organizations. Structuration theory is used as a framework for understanding differences betw...

The recent creation of global-area computer networks invites the development of tools and resources that can reap the scholarly advantages of such technology. In this paper, we discuss prospects for the productive use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) for scholarly interaction. We begin by describing the technology used to deliver informatio...

Little has been written about the organizational role of technical communica tors. Using a systems approach to organizational theory, we argue that techni cal communicators engage in tasks that permit them to function as "boundary spanners. "As boundary spanners, technical communicators both disseminate and make sense of information required for co...

Much of the research dealing with the relationship between candidate images and candidate preferences has attempted to assess dimensions of the candidate's image that are relatively “personal” in nature. By and large, most of this research focuses on static traits—for example, aspects of the candidate's persona relating to such dimensions as warmth...

This essay constructs frameworks for understanding how organizations may function as rhetorical contexts. Initially, traditional and modern approaches to rhetorical context are compared and conclusions are drawn about where organizations, as a form of context, may fit within each. Then two approaches to organizational theory that have implications...

This article introduces a new procedure for assessing communication style, the Communication Style Q-Set (CSQS). The measure, which can be used in a wide variety of contexts, consists of a deck of 100 items describing communication orientations and behaviors. These may be sorted by subjects or raters to describe an individual's unique style. Eviden...

Developed a communication styles Q-set (CSQS) and used it to probe differences between the sexes and between Ss with different psychological gender orientations in 181 female and 44 male teachers (mean ages 33.6 and 32.7 yrs, respectively). Discriminant analyses were conducted using biological sex and psychological gender identity as dependent vari...

Traditional models of participative decision making neglect the role subordinates play in establishing a participative environment. In this study, participative decision making is viewed as a social phenomenon defined through interaction between superiors and subordinates. Data obtained from 264 employees of a large social service organization were...

The present study was designed to investigate the relationship experience of males and females who do not conform to sex-typical orientations to intimacy. One hundred sixty-three couples' and 88 nondating singles' (total N=414) responses to the Relationship World Index—Version 2 (RWI-2) were analyzed via discriminant analysis to determine if subjec...

The similarities between communication consulting and organizational development (OD) consulting make it tempting to borrow the OD theorists’ approaches to ethical problems within consulting situations. This paper contends that OD theorists have been unable to produce a satisfying ethical framework for guiding consulting behavior. It is suggested i...