The Maricopa County Heat Relief Network (HRN) is an ad-hoc partially self-organized network with some attributes of hierarchical coordination that forms each year to provide heat relief and hydration to residents in need by operating as cooling centers. These HRN organizations are a collection of non-profit, governmental and religious organizations. This dissertation looks at the HRN from a complexity governance perspective and engaged different parts of the network in interviews to learn more about their perspective in delivering heat relief. Further, participatory modeling with a prototype agent based model was done with the HRN coordinating agencies to look for emergent outcomes in the HRN system and learn from their perspective. Chapter one evaluates organizational theory and complexity with climate adaptation, hazard preparedness and resilience in the HRN. Chapter two presents results from interviews with HRN facility managers and evaluates their perspective on how they function to offer heat relief. Chapter three finds that the HRN is a good example of complexity governance when engaged through a participatory agent based modeling approach. Chapter four engages the HRN coordinators in participatory agent based modeling interviews to increase their systems level awareness, learn about their perspective on heat relief delivery, and how the system can be improved. Chapter five looks across the different levels of the HRN investigated, the facility managers and coordinators, for differences and similarities in perspectives. The research conducted in this dissertation shows different levels of systems awareness of the different parts of the HRN and how participatory modeling can be used to increase systems awareness. Results indicate that there was very little horizontal network connection between HRN facility managers and most of the interaction was vertically coordinated indicating opportunities for increased network communication in the future both horizontally and vertically if communication interventions were put in place.

Public organizations have been interested in tapping into the creativity and passion of the public through the use of open innovation, which emphasizes bottom-up ideation and collaboration. A challenge for organizational adoption of open innovation is that the quick-start, bottom-up, iterative nature of open innovation does not integrate easily into the hierarchical, stability-oriented structure of most organizations. In order to realize the potential of open innovation, organizations must be willing to change the way they operate. This dissertation is a case study of how Arizona State University (ASU), has adapted its organizational structure and created unique programming to incorporate open innovation. ASU has made innovation, inclusion, access, and real world impact organizational priorities in its mission to be the New American University. The primarily focus of the case study is the experiential knowledge of administrative leaders and administrative intermediaries who have managed open innovation programming at the university over the past five years. Using theoretical pattern matching, administrator insights on open innovation adoption are illustrated in terms of design stages, teamwork, and ASU's culture of innovation. It is found that administrators view iterative experimentation with goals of impact as organizational priorities. Institutional support for iterative, experimental programming, along with the assumption that not every effort will be successful, empowers administrators to push to be bolder in their implementation of open innovation. Theoretical pattern matching also enabled a detailed study of administrator alignment regarding one particular open innovation program, the hybrid participatory platform 10,000 Solutions. Creating a successful and meaningful hybrid platform is much more complex than administrators anticipated at the outset. This chapter provides administrator insights in the design, management, and evaluation of participatory platforms. Next, demographic assessment of student participation in open innovation programming is presented. Demographics are found to be reflective of the university population and provide indicators for how to improve existing programming. This dissertation expands understanding of the task facing administrators in an organization seeking to integrate open innovation into their work.

It is now fashionable to seek innovation in the public sector. As routine government practices have failed to solve complex policy problems, innovation is increasingly seen as the key to establishing public faith in government agencies' ability to perform. However, not surprisingly, governments have often failed to support and maintain innovation over time. The purpose of this study is to examine what accounts for sustained innovation in government transparency. This is an in-depth analysis of the diffusion of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act (EFOIA) across the US states from 1996 to 2013. With the theoretical basis of policy diffusion, this study measures the degree of innovation among states by the timing of adoption, and by the extent of implementation. The factors that influence states' adoption and implementation of EFOIA will be compared, thereby explaining why some early adopters failed to maintain the leader position in innovation in government transparency through the implementation phase. The study findings show that the failure of early adopters in sustained innovation is the result of the conditional nature of diffusion mechanisms (i.e. socialization and learning) which operate differently at the adoption and implementation stages of EFOIA. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role of the legal environment created by the federal government, and the relationships between state governments in sustaining innovation in government transparency.

Newer communication technologies (CTs) will always vie with more mature technologies for the attention of time-constrained legislators. As continual advances in CT make new methods of communication available to legislators, it is important to understand how newly introduced CTs influence novel and changing legislator behaviors. The mixed-method research presented in this study provides deep insights into the relationships between legislators and the CTs they use. This study offers many contributions, among them: it effectively bridges a gap between existing Internet Enabled CT (IECT) behavioral studies on non-legislators by expanding them to include legislator behavior; it expands existing narrowly focused research into the use of CT by legislators by including both IECT and mature CTs such as face-to-face meetings and telephone; it provides a fresh perspective on the factors that make CTs important to legislators, and it uncovers legislator behaviors that are both useful, and potentially harmful, to the process of democracy in the United States. In addition, this study confirms and extends existing research in areas such as minority party constituent communication frequency, and extends the topic of legislator CT behavior into some unanticipated areas such as constituent selective behaviors and the use of text messaging during floor debates which effectively enable lobbyists and paid consultants to participate real-time in floor debates in the Arizona House and Senate.

Most of challenges facing today's government cannot be resolved without collaborative efforts from multiple non-state stakeholders, organizations, and active participation from citizens. Collaborative governance has become an important form of management practice. Yet the success of this inclusive management approach depends on whether government agencies and all other involved parties can collectively deliberate and work toward the shared goals. This dissertation examines whether information technology (IT) tools and prior cooperative interactions can be used to facilitate the collaboration process, and how IT tools and prior cooperative interactions can, if at all, get citizens and communities more engaged in collaborative governance. It focuses on the individual and small groups engaged in deliberating on a local community problem, which is water sustainability in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Experiments were conducted to compare how people deliberate and interact with each other under different IT-facilitated deliberation environments and with different prehistory of interactions. The unique experimental site for this research is a designed deliberation space that can seat up to 25 participants surrounded by the immersive 260-degree seven-screen communal display. In total, 126 students from Arizona State University participated in the experiment. The experiment results show that the deliberation spaces can influence participants' engagement in the collaborative efforts toward collective goals. This dissertation demonstrates the great potential of well-designed IT-facilitated deliberation spaces for supporting policy deliberation and advancing collaborative governance. This dissertation provides practical suggestions for public managers and community leaders on how to design and develop the desired features of IT-facilitated interaction environments for face-to-face and computer-mediated online public deliberation activities. This dissertation also discusses lessons and strategies on how to build a stronger sense of community for promoting community-based efforts to achieve collective goals.