In dramatic numbers, public organizations in an increasing number of countries are embracing modern networked communications such as the World Wide Web and, in the process, are creating the foundations for governance in an information age. The publics in these countries expect, and are told by political leaders, that these expensive changes will produce both more openness and more effectiveness in government. Other countries are watching these developments with great interest, with a view to learning from the experience of others as they approach these big changes. The difficulty, however, is that conflicts may arise between openness and effectiveness. Under some organizational configurations, agencies may be inadvertently forced to emphasize one value over the other, or fail obviously at both.

Currently, too little is known about the operational effects of these new technologies in public organizations and what tradeoffs in values and/or structures must be made in implementation. The existing literatures addressing computer-mediated networks are generally promotional, speculative, and focused on private organizations. This lack of knowledge can set public organizations on path-dependent directions that may be undesirable and difficult to change.

Policy-makers and public managers need more comparative knowledge about the relationship between values, structures and environments in public organizations relying on networked computer-mediated operations. In particular, it is important to address two questions:

• under what conditions of use are networked computer-mediated operations (NCMOs) strongly correlated with some structures and values and not others?
• what structural and procedural alternatives exist for public managers to assure acceptable levels of both effectiveness and open government while implementing networked operations?

This NSF project is designed to gather data and provide analyses of these questions. Using event history analysis and a modified organizational configuration approach enriched by focused policy analysis, the project will investigate an emerging natural experiment, the diffusion of networked computer-mediated operations across a wide set of public agencies. Using the World Wide Web and field research, we will conduct network research on modernizing agencies across westernized nations, with a smaller set of in-depth studies of exemplar agencies in selected countries. In addition, the project database will be continuously available on the Web for policy-makers, public managers, and scholars pursuing these and other questions. This work will establish a foundation for near- and long-term public management research on the transformation and consequences of the information age for public governance.

Since September 1995, every two months key research staff have used increasing numbers of search engines to scan the web for new agency sites across a variety of nations. This has produced the most comprehensive database on government agencies available on the web today. The initial data set included national agencies of the United States and European Union nations categorized by type and noted by exact URL and title. Since January 1996, we have included the fifty state governments of the United States and the state of Israel. In May 1996 we added the German state governments. In November 1966 we included the Australian states. As of May 1997, however, we will have the entire community of nations at the national level (about 180 countries) scanned across the basic list of 26 sectors/policy issue areas. During the summer of 1997, we will include the remaining state level data of such countries as India. A lack of staff has delayed the coding of each website until summer 1997; by fall 1997, however, our web site (http://w3.arizona.edu/~CyPRG/webhome.html) will have the national level sites coded according to their relative openness (defined as data density or transparency) and accountability (defined as interactivity or link value).

In addition, our web site will present preliminary results of our targetted field research interviews focussed on early agency entrants in the telecommunications, defense, and regional/local sectors. These sectors show vigorous growth across western countries early in this research and hence offer the best opportunities for investigation into how agencies early on the web originally planned to use, and now are evolving in their operational use of, the agency's web network. In particular, we will be exploring how intranets may affect the agency's public web presence. This research will occur in two stages, beginning in summer 1997 and ending in summer 1998. As the database matures, it will serve the needs of researchers all over the world who are pursuing a multitude of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary questions concerning "webbed governance".