Class Projects Benchmark E-Government Web Sites
Teams of Heinz School students from the MSPPM and HCPM programs benchmarked civic engagement or health and human services components of leading county e-government Web sites as part of newly designed Information Technology for Public Policy and Management classes.
Two new Heinz School courses, ITPPM: Database Management Systems and ITPPM: Web Design and Development, each start with four weeks of learning a technology and its applications in government. Next is a two-week, intensive project with only project issues dealt with in class meetings. The final period is one to two weeks of "fun" topics, such as an introduction to geographic information systems or an introduction to Visual Basic.NET programming for using databases.
Governments should take advantage of the huge volume of traffic on their e-government Web sites to entice citizens to participate in government. Sixty percent of Americans are Internet users. Thirty-one percent of American Internet users search the Internet for government information and services. Nevertheless, civic engagement and e-government services often are treated as two separate Web sites. The project objective was to determine the extent to which the best county e-government Web sites have civic engagement components. The top two student projects on civic engagement were:
- Project by Group 01 (Enn Metsar, Panote Preechyanud, Elizabeth Roen, Laurel Shaw, and Takahiro Suzuki)
- Project by Group 17 (Emre Basaran, Kate Bloniarz, Emily Eelman, and Asheley Van Ness)
Many human services problems such as substance addiction or mental impairment are outside the realm of common knowledge and experience of direct clients or caregivers. E-government services in this area should provide good access to expertise in many forms; nevertheless, students found that even the best county Web sites are inadequate in this regard. The top two student projects on health and human services were:
- Project by Group 11 (Padma Natarajan, Steven Pedigo, Carla Salman-Martinez, and Lingling Zhang)
- Project by Group 16 (Denise Beauvais, Sam Garman, Sapna Shah, and Hiroshi Tsuchiya).
The first week of a project is for conceptual design and building project management capabilities. The second week draws on all team resources to build the product. Professor Gorr is a member of every student team as the senior project leader. He provides the research questions and beginning designs, and similar to working in organizations, the junior team members carry out the work and deal with the technologies. Each team also has a teaching assistant (pictured) for help on research or technical issues.
While under development, the student project Web sites are password protected so that only team members and the teaching staff can access them. After the course is over password protection is removed so that students can use their project Web sites for internship and job interviews.
You can review any of the teams' projects by substituting 01 through 22 for NN in http://itclass.heinz.cmu.edu/itppmweb03/groupNN.