Presented at APPAM Fall Conference 2011, Thu, 03 Nov 2011.
In this paper, we address the challenges and opportunities that the new development in ICT poses for governments, and begin to outline some potential solutions. Governments in North America have set explicit goals to increase the environmental sustainability of their infrastructure, promote sustainable local economic development, protect consumer health, promote nutrition, or establish greener, more efficient supply chains. These commitments are real, and substantial, but the information problems found in real markets have, until now, made many of those goals more elusive. This paper presents observations from research sponsored by the National Science Foundation (through its Community-based Interoperable Data Networks Program), the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT-Mexico), and the Canadian and COMEXUS Fulbright Commissions. Our interdisciplinary and multinational research team blends approaches from digital government research, public policy analysis, and system science to investigate new ways of combining traditional regulatory tools with crowd-sourced information from stakeholder networks.