Talk Title: “When Do Local Governments Use Tech To Improve Transparency? The Case of California Transit”
Speaker: Alison Post, Associate Professor, Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies, UC Berkeley
Abstract: Transparency reforms instituting sunshine laws and open public meetings have been actively promoted in recent decades as means of keeping elected officials and bureaucrats more accountable to the public. Advances in communication technologies have enabled a new generation of such transparency-enhancing reforms and practices — including open data portals, posting program information online and security alert systems. Under what circumstances do local governments adopt such technologies? This talk investigates this question by examining patterns of adoption and utilization of one technology — online scheduling information for public transit — for a comprehensive set of local transit providers in California, drawing on original, webscraped data.
Speaker Bio: Alison Post holds the Travers Family Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Chair of Political Science and is associate professor of global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines urban politics and policy and other political economy themes, including public service delivery, regulation and business-government relations. She also collaborates with engineers, urban planners and scholars of public health on research on infrastructure management and “smart city” technology adoption. She works principally in Latin America, and recently in India and the United States as well. She is a former president of the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association and former co-director of the global metropolitan studies program at UC Berkeley, and currently chair of the steering committee for the Red de Economía Política de America Latina (Repal).
About the Series: CITRIS Research Exchange delivers fresh perspectives on information technology and society from distinguished academic, industry and civic leaders. Free and open to the public, these seminars feature leading voices on societal-scale research issues. Presentations take place on Wednesdays from noon to 1 p.m. PT. Have an idea for a great talk? Please feel free to suggest potential speakers for our series.
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