Inaugural “Fellow of the Digital Government Society”

In the Information School’s Weekly “Research Shout Outs and News: June 11, 2021,” it was communicated:

Along with one other inaugural recipient (Dr. Gil-Garcia), today at the 22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2021) the award of “Fellow of the Digital Government Society,” which honors exceptional and groundbreaking contributions to the study domain of Digital Government, was conferred to Hans Jochen Scholl. The Digital Government Society, of which Jochen was a founding member in 2005, and for which he served as the Third President (2009-2010), is an association of hundreds of scholars worldwide. In his acceptance speech Jochen urged his colleagues to focus their research during times of increasingly challenged democracies worldwide more frequently on “problematic outcomes” of digital government, which he characterized as Type A (desirable, but not successful) and Type B (not desirable, but successful). He maintained that “some of the technically best, yet most invasive, most suppressive, and albeit most ‘successful’ digital government systems are not committed to democracy in any shape or form but rather support and foster autocracy and dictatorships.” Such “successes” in Digital Government Jochen characterized as extremely undesirable and highly problematic. His remarks were met with great applause from the dg.o 2021 audience.

Watch the acceptance speech here.