Cyberinfrastructure and Digital Government

The NSF’s proposed Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Program addresses the creation of electronic infrastructure to enable more ubiquitous, comprehensive knowledge environments that provide complete functionality for the science and engineering research communities in terms of people, data, information, tools, and instruments, while providing unprecedented capability and capacity for computation, storage, and communication. Such an infrastructure will enable research, education, and other knowledge-intensive communities to share and collaborate over time, distance, organizations, and disciplines.

It is important however to recognize that the CI being created, enhanced and expanded today will impact all expressions of social behavior and most specifically the workings of government. It makes no more sense to plan for the support future CI will provide to science and engineering in isolation from its social, cultural and governmental value than it does to consider only the academic purpose of the Internet and the Web as they exist today. All decisions made in the course of building up our nation’s CI will impact social and governmental functions. The interests of the latter must therefore be considered in the process.

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