Narrowing the Digital Divide: Digital Equity, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Digital Government

Description

Governments at all levels continue to promote, grow, and augment their digital engagement with the citizens that they serve. Through social media, mobile applications, online services, and other forms of digital services, governments are increasingly expecting that individuals will interact with them through a range of digital media and technologies. This includes public policy-making (e.g., governance), government operations (e.g. emergency management), citizen engagement (e.g. transparency), and government services (e.g., information provision).

As the pandemic illustrated, there remains a significant divide in terms of access, know-how and infrastructure in terms of citizens accessing the internet and fully participating in society. This divide extended to engagement with government and associated resources and services. The pandemic, and the post-pandemic environment, has highlighted the disparities that various populations, particularly marginalized groups, and governments face in achieving a vision of digital inclusion for all.

As governments promote digital pathways for service and resource provision, as well as engagement, it is critical for governments to ensure that all citizens are able to realize their needs through inclusive design, availability, and accessibility. Digital divides remain, from access to sufficient technologies (e.g., broadband, devices, costs), the ability to use technologies, and the design of digital government services. This minitrack focuses on digital inclusion within digital government services.

The minitrack includes (but is not limited to) topics such as:

• Supporting digital equity efforts to engage underserved populations;
• The development of inclusive digital government;
• Longitudinal analyses of inclusion in digital government;
• The role of digital literacy in use/non-use of online government services;
• The use of digital government by immigrant, migrant, and displaced populations;
• The use of digital government by indigenous populations;
• The use of digital government by low-literacy populations;
• The role of socio-economic status on the use of digital government;
• Accessibility of digital government for people with perceptual, motor, or cognitive disabilities;
• The role of government in the development of international standards for digital accessibility;
• The role of community-based organizations or anchor institutions (e.g., public libraries, non-government organizations) in fostering digital inclusion;
• Development and/or implementation of statutes, regulations or policies related to digital inclusion;
• Developments in case law and policy related to digital inclusion;
• Trends in comparative or international law related to digital inclusion;
• The relationship between trust of institutions and use of digital government by diverse populations;
• How digital-based voting impacts involvement of citizens in elections
• LGBTQ+ interactions with digital government;
• Usability evaluation methods for testing digital government services with diverse user populations;
• Impacts of the COVID-19 on the ability of marginalized groups to engage with digital government;
• Research methods for understanding why diverse individuals avoid using digital government; and,
• Inclusive design methods to involve diverse populations in the development of digital government services.

Minitrack Leaders

Elizabeth Vitullo holds a dual role at West Virginia University as the Assistant Vice President of Economic Innovation for the Office of the President and the Assistant Dean for Strategic initiatives at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics. Vitullo provides strategic and operational leadership to advance WVU’s role in growing and diversifying West Virginia’s economy by working collaboratively with key partners and supporting strategic and emerging initiatives. Additionally, she works to align economic innovation efforts with both the academic and outreach mission of WVU These efforts include broadband expansion, digital equity, workforce and support of cyber efforts. Vitullo has a great deal of experience in developing and launching new academic programs and initiatives, she currently serves as the Coordinator of the Healthcare MBA program.

Jonathan Lazar, PhD, LLM is a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, where he is the executive director of the Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility (MIDA). Dr. Lazar has authored or edited 17 books on HCI, accessibility, and law, including Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction, and has published over 200 refereed articles. He served as the general chair of the 2021 ACM ASSETS conference, is the recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility and the 2016 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award, and is a member of the SIGCHI Academy. 

Dr Stephen Thorpe is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in the School of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the Auckland University of Technology. He leads the innovative Master of IT Project Management that he co-created and lectures on team facilitation, digital transformation and change management, IT project management and supervises students undertaking a range of project management and agile related research projects. He is the director of the Project Management Research Office and a director of Zenergy, a company delivering facilitation training, coaching programmes and services in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and in the US. Stephen's research interests include online team effectiveness, group facilitation, virtual worlds, second order project management, agile practices, digital government, IT governance, and collective intelligence. Recent work includes a co-authored paper with Bikash Pokhrel (2024) on A Review of Digital Government Challenges in Developing Nations, published in the Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, and A co-authored Systematic Review of Complexity in Agile Software Project Delivery with Taniela Vaipulu and Ramesh Lal presented at the 34th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (2023). Other prominent work includes a co-authored paper with Dr Glyn Thomas on Enhancing the Facilitation of Online Groups in Higher Education (2019), published in Interactive Learning Environments. Also, a chapter on The Gift of Presence in Groups, co-authored with Dr Dale Hunter and published by Routledge in Transforming Worldviews and Practices: Social Ecology and Education (2020) edited by David Wright and Stuart Hill.