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A governance infrastructure is the collection of technologies and systems, people, policies, practices, and relationships that interact to support governing activities. Information technology, especially communication and computational technologies, continues to augment society's ability to organize, interact, and govern. As we think about the future of governance, this article challenges us to move beyond questions of how to best manage government institutions to how to design smart governance systems with the appropriate incentives and rules to harness and coordinate the enthusiasm and capabilities of those governed. This article anticipates how the interaction of technology and society can be leveraged to mindfully design an interaction‐defined, participation‐based governance infrastructure to return power to the people while increasing accountability. Supporting examples of such governance approaches already exist and are regularly emerging in distributed organizations, online communities, nonprofits, and governments.

"Policy informatics is addressing governance challenges and their consequences, which span the seeming inability of governments to solve complex problems and the disaffection of people from their governments. Policy informatics seeks approaches that enable our governance systems to address increasingly complex challenges and to meet the rising expectations of people to be full participants in their communities. This book approaches these challenges by applying a combination of the latest American and European approaches in applying complex systems modeling, crowdsourcing, participatory platforms and citizen science to explore complex governance challenges in domains that include education, environment, and health. The traditional norms of hierarchical governance, expert-driven decision-making, institutional control, and centralization have begun to fade as the costs of community engagement have declined, data have become increasingly available and accessible, and computational and analytical skills have increased dramatically. Further, stakeholders and publics are becoming more diverse, unequal, vocal and polarized. Against this backdrop, the book explores how to enable public values to flourish by promoting new forms of effective governance and exploring the changes necessary in technology, processes, institutional capacity and social norms to realize that future"--

AbstractThough a stronger orientation of research and innovation with a focus on societal needs, demands, and preferences has recently become the main argument under the header of responsible research and innovation, the processes by which community members are included in studies of the future, as well as forward-looking science, technology, and innovation are underexplored. This paper explores the role of participatory agenda-setting in creating governance infrastructures that reflect community participation, boundary object creation, and experimental innovation for increased understanding of future decision tradeoffs. Drawing upon the authors' leadership and participant observation of two participatory agenda-setting projects, this paper contributes to our understanding of what participatory agenda-setting looks like in practice at a boundary organization in higher education. Though not a traditional research study with control and experiment groups, we seek to share our insights and lessons learned from our leadership of two projects with inherent participatory agenda-setting components. The paper culminates in recommendations for future projects which seek to incorporate laypeople into future-oriented research.

Advances in information, communication, and computational technologies allow digital volunteer networks formed by concerned publics across the globe to contribute to an effective response to disasters and crises. Digital volunteer networks are event-centric and emergent networks. Currently, the literature is sharply growing in the fields of communication, computer science, emergency management, and geography. This article aims to assess the current status of the literature and suggest a comprehensive conceptual framework of digital volunteer networks in response to disasters and crises. This framework is based on a traditional input–process–output model consisting of three dimensions: the disaster and crisis context, a voluntary response process, and outputs and outcomes. We also discuss challenges of digital volunteer networks for crisis response. This article is expected to contribute to the development of related theories and hypotheses and practical strategies for managing digital volunteer networks.

How to encourage cooperative behavior and facilitate collaboration amongst diverse stakeholders to achieve collective goals remains a longstanding question in realizing a community's capacity for local problem solving. Governments have increasingly adopted inclusive processes to engage non-state actors, and especially active engagement of citizens and communities in solving local policy challenges. Yet, the success of this inclusive approach depends on whether and to what extent all involved individuals, interest groups, communities, and government agencies can collectively deliberate and work together. We conducted experiments to explore the potential of IT-facilitated communication environment designed for deliberation activities to address collective challenges. Our unique experimental site for this research is a designed deliberation space that can seat up to 30 participants surrounded by the 260-degree seven-screen communal display. Our study shows that when people deliberate on a local community challenge under the environment with a communal display, they show more cooperative behavior in a social dilemma scenario than those who deliberate on the same challenge presented on individual displays. This study highlights the potential of technology's influence on public deliberation in such a way as to promoting collective behavior.