Center for Technology and Public Policy

The Center for Technology and Public Policy (CTPP) was created by IGPA in 2006 to broaden the scope of policy analysis through the use of information technology. The center, led by Senior Fellow Michael Cheney and Senior Research Scientist Tom Prudhomme, has two ongoing grant projects and four research initiatives.

The first grant project is the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND), a program of the Social Security Administration (SSA) mandated by the Ticket to Work Act. CTPP, under the direction of the SSA's primary contractor Abt Associates, is designing, developing and implementing information systems which will support all activities of the demonstration. It will be a user-friendly and secure information system for storing, managing and using information supporting operations, research, management, and administration activities of the project. BOND is a key component of the SSA's Comprehensive Work Opportunities Initiative and will provide various supports in different combinations to test their impact on work and quality of life outcomes for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries.

The second grant project involves working with the U.S. Department of Education and Syracuse University on the “Demand-Side Employment Placement Models” project, funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR). The Center is responsible for developing tools that will help employers evaluate how job definitions affect the accessibility of those jobs to persons with disabilities.

    The Center is also working on four research initiatives:
  1. Develop strategies that will help eliminate the digital divide in Illinois. This project is funded by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity;
  2. Investigate the role of new media and politics in terms of governance and campaigning. Work includes an ongoing research blog and planning for an upcoming conference session in 2009 on open democracy;
  3. Define an international collaborative approach to address policy and decision making relating to how cities respond to the effects of global climate change. This initiative involves discussions with scholars at the Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses, University of Alaska at Fairbanks, University of Michigan, the University of California-San Diego and San Francisco State University;
  4. Develop a secure repository for state and federal data used in research that would be available to scholars across the state.