1 Seattle ’ s Mobile City Project

The City of Seattle’s pioneering Mobile City Government Project has received wide attention, since it promises greatly improved fieldwork operations in local government. Three years into operation and with another fieldwork unit in the process of adopting mobile applications, our research studies the work domains of the units involved to better understand the premises, requirements, and effects of fully mobile, wirelessly connected applications (FWMC). Fully Mobile City Government is an emerging techno-social and organizational phenomenon created by, yet also influencing, human actors who are embedded in a network of relationships and interdependencies of variables, which are in turn rooted in the work and task context of government. The project uses a work-centered analytical framework for deriving and clarifying the strategic choices in such projects via a formative model, which captures and surfaces the interaction and interdependence between major organizational variables and the work context. In this paper, we introduce the research design and report on early observations.