We argue that the Obama Administration's Open Government Initiative blurs distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emerging technology, within administrative agencies. We consider the nature of transparency, participation, and collaboration, suggesting that these processes should be viewed as means toward desirable ends, rather than administrative ends in themselves, as they appear to be currently treated. We propose alternatively that planning OG initiatives be addressed within a "public value" framework. The creation of public value is the goal of public organizations; through public value, public organizations meet public goals with respect to substantive benefits as well as the intrinsic value of better government. We extend this view to OG by using the framework as a way to describe the value produced when interaction between government and citizens becomes more transparent, participative, and collaborative, i.e., more democratic.

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The system dynamics group at the Rockefeller College of the University at Albany has been developing techniques to create system dynamic models with groups of managers during the last 25 years. Building upon their tradition in decision conferencing, the group has developed a particular style that involves a facilitation team in which people play different roles. Throughout these years of experience, the group has also developed several "scripts" to elicit knowledge from experts based on small-groups research, and well-established practices in the development of system dynamics models. This paper constitutes a detailed documentation of a relatively small-scale modeling effort that took place in early 2001, offering a "soup to nuts" description of group model building at Albany. The paper describes in detail nine of the scripts that the group has developed, offering some reflections about their advantages and limitations. Copyright methods. This particular GMB effort was completed over a 4-month period in 2001, and it was designed following the procedures and methods developed at the University at Albany. In addition to presenting a detailed description of the process, and the products associated with the project, the paper also documents the effort needed to accomplish the objectives by both modeling and client teams. The paper extends the discussion about the use of scripts to develop system dynamic models with groups, as initiated by , presenting two new scripts and detailed descriptions and process products of seven scripts more.The case presentation constitutes a "soup to nuts" description of the Albany GMB approach. The description also includes some process-related products published for the first time. 2 These products illustrate the results obtained in the case and assist other system dynamics practitioners to replicate the experience. The perceived success of the experience reported in this paper encouraged continued effort in model building that has extended into 2005, including GMB to examine the dynamics of information integration in intergovernmental projects.Following this brief introduction, the paper is organized into four sections. The first of them consists of a review of previous research in GMB. The next section includes a description of the specific GMB effort documented in this paper. The following section contains a description of the eight scripts used in the GMB, and the final section includes a series of concluding remarks.Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)

Multi-agency disaster management requires collaboration among geographically distributed public and private organizations to enable a rapid and effective response to an unexpected event. Many disaster management systems often lack the capability to cope with the complexity and uncertainty. In this introduction to the special issues on advances in multi-agency disaster management we discuss the role of information, enterprise architecture, coordination and related human efforts aimed at improving multi-agency disaster management. The paper concludes that although there is a common body of knowledge, disaster management is still an under-developed area. There is a need to relate practice and theory by using human-centered approaches such that disaster management can realize its full potential.

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