A channel devoted to my fall 2007 trip to Almaty, Kazakhstan as a US State Department-funded Speaker/Specialist. These videos and comments are my personal views and do not reflect the position of the US Government or my employer.

This was a trip about democratic technologies. The people I met with will use Web 2.0 and advocacy about the digital divide to advance the cause of their nation.

This former Soviet Republic has actually come a long way in a relatively short time. Spending time here and talking to people at length makes you realize they in a founding moment. History teaches us that founding moments are not moments at all; they stretch for years and decades. Current and future Kazakh citizens perhaps will find democratic technologies are one bridge leading to a new way of thinking.

Dr. Stuart W. Shulman received a Bachelors degree from Boston University (Political Science and English) in 1989 and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon (Political Science) in 1999. He is holds a joint appointment in the School of Information Sciences and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Senior Research Associate at Pitt's University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) and in the Université de Genève-, European University Institute-, and Oxford Internet Institute-based E-Democracy Centre.

Dr. Shulman is the founder (2005) and Director of UCSUR's Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP), which is a fee-for-service coding lab currently working on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other U.S. funding agencies. He has been the Principal Investigator and Project Director on related National Science Foundation-funded research projects focusing on electronic rulemaking, human language technologies, manual annotation, digital citizenship, and service-learning efforts in the United States. In 2007, Dr. Shulman was named Director of the Sara Fine Institute and he became a Core Investigator in the Advanced Center for Interventions and Services Research Network Development Core.

Dr. Shulman was the organizer and chair for federal agency-level electronic rulemaking workshops funded by the NSF and held at the Council for Excellence in Government (2001), the National Defense University (2002), the National Science Foundation (2003 & 2006), and The George Washington University (2004). In November of 2006, he chaired a NSF-funded workshop at Pitt titled "Coding across the Disciplines," which brought social and computer scientists together to discuss annotation science.

For five years, Dr. Shulman has served on the Program Committee for the NSF's National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o). He was the dg.o 2006 Workshop and Tutorial Chair and also the Chair of the inaugural Digital Government Society Election Committee. In 2008 he will serve as the dg.o conference Co-Chair. Dr. Shulman reviews individual NSF proposals from multiple cross-cutting NSF divisions and has served on a NSF proposal review panel.

In May 2006, Dr. Shulman became the next Editor of the international Journal of E-Government, which has since been re-named the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. He was the 2004-2005 President of the American Political Science Association's organized section on Information Technology & Politics and he is the current editor of the section newsletter, The ITP News. "Stu" is a former Oregon Tilth certified organic farmer who teaches courses on American national government, environmental policy, sprawl, information technology, qualitative research methods, digital citizenship, governance, and service-learning.