This Dissertation Improvement Grant in Science and Society has as its central purpose to evaluate the effectiveness of Neighborhood Information Systems (NIS) as an Information Technology (IT) -innovated tool in assisting community development. NSF funds will support trips to various sites within the U.S. to Conduct interview and network survey for an in-depth comparative case study NIS is a Geographical Information System (GIS)-enabled technology system which provides interactive mapping tools combined with a conventional database system to assist community development. Many NISs are developed and operated by Public Private Nonprofit Partnerships of community development stakeholders. This is to investigate what contributes to a working interorganizational partnership to develop a successful and effective NIS as an information sharing network to help local economic development and community revitalization. Particularly with IT development, there seems to be the increasing practice and the need for Public Private Nonprofit Partnerships. Utilizing network analysis, this research analyzes relationship dynamics of key stakeholders as a whole in the partnership network for the IT innovation projects, in addition to quantitative and qualitative analyses of studying key attributes of working partnerships. This research also investigates the utilization of NIS in community development stakeholders. This study evaluates whether NIS as an IT application is used in the decision making processes of community development stakeholders. The intellectual merit of this study will be first to understand how community development stakeholder organizations utilize the NIS and how NIS as an information system is managed. Second, more importantly perhaps, it is to understand how to make a partnership network work, particularly of Public Private Nonprofit Partnerships for IT innovation projects. Broader impacts of this study would be to suggest a working partnership model for government, nonprofit, and private sector managers in implementing joint ventures.
