Policy Roundtable: Advancing Knowledge in the Public Sector
Government is commonly viewed as a major user of technology and aggregator of massive amounts of information. However, governments also play a wide range of complex and less understood roles in advancing the generation, management, and use of information and knowledge. These roles include:
- supporting the development of human capital, at least where it makes sense to do so at a national level
- measuring and evaluating social and economic well-being
- supporting the development of advanced knowledge infrastructure
- building capacity for making informed judgments about government policies and operations
- developing techniques, standards, and guidelines for managing and integrating information on a large scale and transforming into actionable knowledge
While these activities are often narrowly tailored to specific purposes, they sometimes end up serving a wide variety of uses, public and private. The commercialization of the Internet and widespread use of federal statistics are two very different examples.
ow effective is the public sector in advancing knowledge practices and processes? What are the economic, social, and political stakes in advanced knowledge infrastructure? Are the issues fully understood? How should government agencies take advantage of distributed knowledge in fulfilling their goals and missions? How can they better increase knowledge capacity both on their own and in collaboration with others? What are the tradeoffs in increasing inter-sector and international cooperation?