The award is another one in a long line of awards received by the Town of Blacksburg (ToB) and the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) for their use of information technology to improve town-citizen communications. Along the way, researchers in the CS department have collaborated with the ToB and the BEV in several of these.

The full announcement can be seen at http://www.blacksburg.va.us/enews/press_release/vml.php.

The most recent award occured under the watchful eye of the Digital Government Project, a project funded by NSF and lead by Dr. Andrea Kavanaugh and Prof. Manuel Perez-Quinones. The goal of the grant is to understand how citizens use information technology with each other to participate in civic life (find information, stay informed, discuss issues, form opinions, deliberate), and to understand how online citizen-to-citizen deliberation links back into local government decision making.  The grant also includes as co-pis Philip Isenhour and Daniel Dunlap. The Task Force Blog is available at  https://secure.bev.net/townplan/.

As part of the study of blogs, the research group joined by Bill Sanders, director of the BEV,  encouraged the Town of Blacksburg to explore the use of Blogs as a way to communicate with the community. The update of the Comprehensive Plan happened to be a great opportunity and the town personnel took advantage of it.  The result was an innovative use of a blog to support communication among the members of the Comprehensive Plan while at the same time keeping the public informed on the progress of their work.  The blog also helped the members of the Task Force manage the editing process of summarizing over 600 pages of Town policies into a user-friendly document.