What made me decide to choose that one famous scientist over so many other possible choices? To tell you the truth, one of the reasons was this funny feeling of immediate connection, something that other people may call 'special chemistry'. I read about this person and, somewhat childishly, thought that I might want to be a little bit like this person when I "grow up". On a more serious note, I like the breadth of her lifelong interests that span from music to political science and digital government. I also admire her persistence in pursuing challenging dreams, and her extraordinary ability to make them come true.
and she
holds a double Ph.D. from Yale University in organizational behavior
and in political science. Currently, Jane Fountain is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, the founder
and Director of the National Center for Digital Government at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The Center has been established with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help build research and infrastructure for the emerging field of research on technology and governance. Over time, in addition to its active research programs, the Center has sponsored numerous research workshops, seminars, doctoral fellowships and visiting scholars from around the world.
Her research focuses on
institutions, global information and communication technologies, and
governance. She is one of the leading experts in the world on e-government issues, and that is the area of research that interests me the most.
Dr. Fountain's research was published not only in various social science journals like the National Civic Review, but also in some leading publications in the field of information and computing, such as the Communications of the ACM. Her book, Building the Virtual State: Information
Technology and Institutional Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), has become the most influential work written by Dr. Fountain so far. In her book, Fountain put forward the "technology enactment theory", which holds that technological possibilities are enacted into technological realities in ways strongly affected by organizational, political and cultural environments.
The book was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title 2002 by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. In case some of you may not know about it, Choice is the premier
source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet
resources published by the American Library Association (ALA). The book has also received an international acclaim and been
translated and published in Chinese, Portuguese, and Japanese.
When the book was first published, Jane Fountain was still an associate professor of public policy at the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. At the same time, she was a research
member of the Internet Policy Institute and director of Women in the
Information Age (WITIA) Project focused on women's involvement in technology. The goal of this Project is to find out if "women are under-represented as users and designers of today's technologies". To this day, Dr. Jane Fountain continues to be a very passionate Project proponent. I suppose that it was her passion and enthusiasm that were instrumental in relocating the Project from Harvard to the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In November 2006, in recognition of Dr. Fountain's achievements, she was interviewed by the Center for Knowledge Transfer and Information
Technologies as part of the SEKT Project. A video of
the interview is available online
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