John Carlo Bertot is Professor and Director of the Center for Library & Information Innovation in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland College Park.  He also serves as Associate Director for Research for the Center for Information Policy and E-Government. Dr. Bertot received his Ph.D. from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.  His research spans government agency technology planning and evaluation, information and telecommunications policy, e-government, and library planning and evaluation. Bertot served on the Board of the Digital Government Society of North America for the last two years, and serves as chair of the International Standards Organization's (ISO) Library Performance Indicator working group and serves as a member of the National Information Standards Organization's (NISO) Business Information Topic committee. Bertot is past Chair of the American Library Association's (ALA) Library Research Round Table.  Also, Bertot is editor of Government Information Quarterly and Library Quarterly.  Over the years, Bertot has received funding for his research from the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Government Accountability Office, the American Library Association, and the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.  More information on Bertot is available at  terpconnect.umd.edu/~jbertot.

Theresa A. Pardo is a research associate professor at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and an affiliate faculty in Informatics, University at Albany. Her primary role is as the Director of the Center for Technology in Government. Her broad portfolio of work has been funded by US federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Justice, the Library of Congress, Office of Personnel and Management, Social Security Administration, and the National Archives and Records Administration; the Governments of China, Turkey, and Portugal; international organizations such as the United Nations and the Inter-American Development Bank; corporations including SAP, AT&T and Microsoft; and numerous New York State government agencies. Pardo has published over 100 articles, research reports, practice guidance documents, book chapters and case studies and has received numerous awards for her written work, including the 2008 Best Paper of the Year Award from the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and the Best Paper Award in the E-Government Track at the 2009 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). She is a recipient of the University at Albany's Excellence in Teaching Award. Pardo is an elected member of multiple boards including the Digital Government Society and a member of the editorial board for several peer-reviewed journals, including Government Information Quarterly. Theresa began working as part of the dg.o team when she served as program co-chair for dg.o 2005 held in Atlanta and then again for dg.o 2006 in San Diego. She served as conference co-chair for dg.o 2007. During the Society formation process she served as a member of the constitution drafting committee and the first election committee. She has also served as chair of the DGSNA sponsorship committee. Theresa has also served numerous times as conference co-chair and program co-chair for the International Conference on Electronic Governance (ICEGOV) and for several years as co-chair of the Emerging Topics Mini-Track for the Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences. Theresa received her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University at Albany. For more information please see www.ctg.albany.edu or send email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Jochen Scholl is an assistant professor in the University of Washington's Information School. He teaches and conducts research on information management, process change, and organizational transformation in government and other organizations. He employs both quantitative computer simulation techniques and qualitative research designs. Jochen has studied the strategies, motives, and focal areas of business and process change in digital government projects as well as the current practices employed in such projects. His special interests include integration, interoperability, organizational transformation, and the strategic choices in mobile technology diffusion in digital government.

He is the PI of the NSF-funded Fully Mobile City Government research project (2005 to 2008). Jochen is involved in the organization of the three major conferences on electronic or digital government. He chairs the Electronic Government Track at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). He also serves as a member of the organizing committees of dgo2006 and the DEXA/EGOV conferences. He has been engaged in the formation of the Digital Government Society of North America and was elected to the board of officers by public vote. He  has also been appointed to serve on the European E-Government Society's board as liaison to the North American Society. Jochen facilitated the worldwide discussion and voting processes on both the Society's Mission Statement and its constitutions. He has also been an active member of the Society's journal committee.

Luis Felipe Luna-Reyes is a Professor in the Business School at the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla in México. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University at Albany. Luna-Reyes is co-chair of an International Research Group with members of Canada, US and Mexico, and also a member of the Mexican National Research System. He is the author or co-author of articles published in Government Information Quarterly, European Journal of Information Systems, Inernational Journal of Electronic Government Research, Gestión y Política Pública, and Revista de Administración Pública, among others. His research focuses on electronic government and on modeling collaboration processes in the development of information technologies across functional and organizational boundaries.

Personal Statement: I have been a member of the digital government community for several years, participating in the Annual Research Conference since 2003. I have been Program Committee Member, Conference Co-Chair, and currently Program Chair for the 2012 Conference.

A Fulbright scholar and Cunningham Fellow, Andrea Kavanaugh is Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director of the interdisciplinary research Center for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her research lies in the areas of social computing and communication behavior and effects. She leads research on the use and social impact of information and communication technology funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, including the Digital Government Program, and currently the Human-Centered Computing Program and the Social-Computational Systems Program. She is the author or editor of three books; her research is also published in American Behavioral Scientist, Interacting with Computers, Journal for Computer Mediated Communication, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and The Information Society, among others. She has been presenting research at Digital Government Society (DGS) conferences since 2004.

Prior to joining the HCI Center in 2002, Dr. Kavanaugh served as Director of Research for the community computer network known as the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) from its inception in 1993. She holds an MA from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Environmental Design and Planning (with a focus on telecommunications) from Virginia Tech. For more detail please see http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/89; she can be reached at kavan AT vt DOT edu.

Prior to joining the Board of the Digital Government Society (DGS) she served on the Board of the International Telecommunications Society (2002-08). She has served as Chair of the Web Communication Committee for DGS (2006-2007) and as Secretary of the Board of DGS (2007-11).

DGSNA, the Digital Government Society of North America, has remarkably grown in the past 10 years from a new, fledgling society under the guardianship of NSF to an independent society of academicians and practitioners. It has taken an inclusive approach to encourage involvement of researchers, students and government officials from North American regions and worldwide. I have been fortunate to be a part of this community as a PhD student, as an academic member and as a volunteer, and have been honored to participate in and later lead the community activities and events of the Society. In the past few years, I have been part of the organizing team of the Society's annual flagship dg.o conference, and I have witnessed not only the growth and maturity, but also the challenges to make the society a more vibrant and engaging community. I have also organized efforts to reach out to interested individuals and share information about our activities with them by establishing and managing social network accounts such as the digital government society Facebook group, and the digital government society Twitter account.

In the future, the Society needs to continue its outreach to achieve growth of the membership of the Society, including more government officials and future generations of students, and attract ever more interest and enthusiasm from people all over the world who are interested in digital government issues and activities. The Society will continue nurturing and enriching our events, publications, and educational activities. The flagship conference, dg.o, needs to continually enhance the quality and quantity of published papers and expand attendance by researchers, students, government officials, industry leaders as well as attract new sponsors. We should continue to listen to and satisfy the needs and issues of the digital government research and practice community, maintaining DGSNA as the leading organization in digital government all over the world.

I am honored to serve as a member of a catalyst team to achieve these goals. My experience as dg.o conference organizer, working with the leaders and members of the community has been very positive and I am committed to making DGSNA a model society, serving as an eminent group and as the leading organization of its members and other interested parties. I will collaborate with the board officers, members and other competing societies to identify and improve the priority areas of the Society and to maintain our Society's upward trajectory.

Dr. Yigal Arens is a Deputy Director of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and Director of its Intelligent Systems Division. He is also Director of the Digital Government Research Center at ISI and a Research Professor at USC's Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering.

Dr. Arens received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, working in natural language processing. In 1983 he joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at USC. In 1987 he moved to USC's Information Sciences Institute where for almost ten years he headed the SIMS (Single Interface to Multiple Sources) research group, specializing in integration of heterogeneous databases and other information sources.

Dr. Arens has been instrumental in organizing the dg.o conferences since the first one in 2000 and has served as treasurer of the DGSNA since it was created in 2006.

Sehl Mellouli has been a professor in the department of Information Systems at Laval University, Quebec City, Canada since June 2005. He has a Ph. D. in Computer Science from Laval University in 2005. He has an MBA in Management Information Systems from Laval University. He is also an engineer in computer science from the Ecole Nationale des Sciences Informatiques, Tunis, Tunisia. His main research interests are e-government, smart cities, multi-agent systems, semantic web, and IS design and implementation. He is a regular member at the Research and Transfer Center on Enterprise Architecture at Laval University, and an associate member at the Interuniversity Research Center on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation. He has several funded projects from grant agencies in Canada. Currently, he is a PI of an international project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on smart cities with partners from USA (Theresa Pardo, Jochen Scholl), Mexico (Ramon-Gil Garcia), and China (Elsa Estevez, Adegboyega Ojo). He has several publications in well known journals and conferences.

Personal Statement: I was a member of the North American Digital Government Working Group. I was involved either as poster chair or member of the Program Committee of dg.o since 2008. My interest to serve as a board member is to bring the Canadian research and practice communities to the Society.

I am an Associate Professor in the Information and Computer Sciences Department at the University of Hawaii. My background is in Cognitive Science, my general area of research is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and my specific research activities right now involve the use of social networks for civic engagement. I became interested in digital government after studying the "butterfly ballot" incident in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. With the help of a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) award, I worked on the design and evaluation of digital searching and browsing environments to support voter decision-making. I was privileged to participate in invited workshops on electronic voting at both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Telecommunications Board of the National Academies of Science. I am currently at the beginning of another NSF project to study the use of social networking technology during upcoming U.S. election periods.

I have been involved with the DGSNA since 2006 and served on the conference program committee in 2010, 2011, and 2012. I have served as a HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences) minitrack co-chair every year since 2008, and was the lead member of the the HICSS e-Government Symposium committee for 2011 and 2012. I have also served on the program committees of ICEGOV and Communities & Technologies. Outside of the digital goverment area, I have always been deeply involved with the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interation (ACM-SIGCHI), including co-chairing their conference in 1995.

My driving motivations for working in this area are to understand how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be utilized by citizens for purposes of political and civic participation, and to help in the design and evaluation of systems with which citizens are involved. I try to advocate for involving all stakeholders, including and especially citizens, in the design, deployment, and evaluation of digital government and e-participation systems.