Electronic government systems have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of the people that they are designed to serve. To this day, this potential is barely beginning to be exploited. Significant barriers hinder the effective integration of information technologies into government practices and their adoption by the public. Government agencies often find themselves in a disadvantaged position to compete with the private sector for information technology workers, a workforce whose shortage at a national level is well recognized. The need to abide by rigid procurement practices makes it virtually impossible for agencies to keep their technology infrastructure up to date with the fast pace of technological advances. For instance, Amdahl’s law, a well known technological trend, predicts that processing speed doubles approximately every two years. Today, this trend shows no sign of slowing down in the near future. Local and regional governments are particularly affected by this state of affairs.

A multidisciplinary group including researchers from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez (UPRM) and personnel from the municipal government of the City of Mayagüez proposes to combine their talents in Public Administration, Computer Science, Engineering and Social Sciences, in order to: identify significant barriers to the effective transfer of information technology into government practices and their adoption by the public, engineer novel solutions to help overcome these barriers, and test their solutions in a real municipal governmental environment. The team from the city of Mayagüez will include experts on Information Systems, Engineering and Public Administration. The technical side of the UPRM group encompasses faculty members with expertise in Distributed Data Base Systems, Information Retrieval, and High Performance Computing. From the Social Sciences the UPRM group includes faculty members with expertise in Political Sciences and Psychology.

The intellectual merit rests on a solid multidisciplinary research plan including a series of activities expected to generate significant original contributions in Electronic Government, Information Retrieval, Distributed Databases, and Social Impact of Technology. More specifically the proposal will conduct research in the following areas: (1) Multi-lingual information archiving and retrieval of governmental repositories, (2) Automatic representation and extraction of semantic information from government documents, (3) Wide-area secure collaborative government-government databases, and (4) Economic and social barriers to technology adoption by common citizens.

The education plan will involve students in the design and development of original solutions to real problems faced by the city of Mayagüez. Undergraduate students from the various disciplines will work together in multidisciplinary teams under the direct supervision of the CoPI’s. Graduate students will work towards completing thesis at both masters and doctoral levels. Each student will be expected to conduct his/her project during a period of a year and will be required to follow the best professional practices and standards of their corresponding professions. The process will include several phases: meeting with City officials and personnel in order to identify problems, writing a formal proposal including a preliminary design of the solution, developing the solution, writing a final report, and finally presenting the project achievements in an e-government workshop to be held at the end of each academic year during the duration of the project. All projects will be required to some element of novelty. The process will provide student with an invaluable opportunity to improve their language and communications skills in preparation for a successful career in the future.

The proposed project has great potential to achieve significant broader impacts with particular emphasis on the following areas: (1) promote collaborative teaching, training and learning between academia and government, (2) broaden participation of Hispanic groups of students, faculty, public administrators and the general public in governmental affairs (3) build much needed research and education partnerships between government and academia, and (4) promote active investment of UPRM talent and knowledge in the improvement of the living conditions of its surrounding communities. Approximately 50% of the undergraduate engineering students at UPRM are women. Virtually all of the undergraduate students and most of the faculty members and graduate students at the UPRM are Hispanics. Therefore, this project will significantly boost the opportunities available to members of underrepresented groups to carry out cutting-edge multidisciplinary research and development in science and engineering areas related to Digital Government. The project will foster direct interaction among people with widely diverse educational levels and backgrounds.