This grant will bring together a multi-disciplinary team (technical and social/organizational) to explore deployment of and impact of e-government services in Puerto Rico, with security, privacy and other enabling IT capabilities. The City of Mayaguez will be the government partner. Multi-lingualism will be one of the technical themes, along with automated representation and extraction of semantic information, and collaborative secure wide area government to government databases. Social science aspects include study of economic/social barriers to technological adoption. Most e-gov deployments operate on the principle of 'build it and they will come'; unfortunately many times they don't come. This project will help us understand the barriers to citizens' full embrace of e-gov services in an environment which will allow leapfrogging of older web technologies, working with a populace that is not sophisticated and is inexperienced with e-gov services. Strong leverage will be provided by the City and the University.
