This week’s launch of the Irish Government’s Open Public Service Reform Plans, included a set of objectives in relation to Open Data, along with new commitments in areas such as cloud computing and shared services.

The reform plan establishes the internet as a means of providing new services to deliver more citizen centric public services, whilst providing greater value for money.

The reform agenda is based on five major commitments to change. These include a focus on customer service, establishing innovative delivery channels, reducing costs through better value for money, establishing new ways of working, and a focus on the implementation and delivery of the plan. There is an emphasis on online services, and e-Government initiatives as a platform upon which these commitments can be delivered.

Five Commitments to change

1) Placing customer service at the core of everything – though:

• the roll-out of a new Public Services Card to access Government services,
• the provision online and expansion of Government services performance information (in a similar vein to the current Healthstat initiative),
• the implementation of a single online application process for student grants.

2) Maximising new and innovative service delivery channels - through:

• the roll-out of additional online services including first time voter registration and the progressive roll-out of FixYourStreet.ie
• improved sharing of data on businesses through Revenue’s Business Register
• piloting the use of Cloud Computing in 2012 and evaluation of a roll-out across the Public Service
• roll-out of more innovative technologies to facilitate interactions with citizens (examples could include initiatives such as e-petitions)

3) Reducing costs to drive better value for money – through:

• reduction of 23,500 in Public Service numbers by 2015
• identification of new business models to support delivery of a range of non-core processes/services (e.g. outsourcing of IT of business processes through shared service centers)
• accelerating the reform of procurement and consolidation of ICT infrastructure through greater use of data centres

4) New ways of working – through:

• the implementation of shared services models in areas such as HR, Finance, Payroll, Banking and Pensions
• establishment of a Public Service Chief Information Officer (CIO) Council to assist and advise the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on IT and eGovernment initiatives

5) Focus on implementation and delivery - through:

• reform and Delivery Office established to drive implementation and prioritisation
• establishment of consistent baseline performance information across a number of functional areas e.g. Finance, HR, ICT.

Open Data Commitments

The plan highlights transparency and better decision-making as outcomes from the release of more public data:

Citizens and businesses should have access to information on the availability and performance of key services. Increased sharing and publication of public data will increase transparency, aid the democratic process and drive better decision-making for individuals and businesses, as well as for Government and the Public Service.

Following on from this is a commitment to:

Publish data held by Public Service organisations online where possible within legal constraints. This should be explored both within the Public Service and with academic and private sector organisations, and should seek to identify how such publishing can be done in a way that provides value to the general public and facilitates the development of both free and commercial products.

Along with this, the plan outlines an objective to create a single portal through which public service data will be released (in a similar vein to data.gov and data.gov.uk):

Publish existing online information and services through a centralised portal to increase awareness and access. Leverage this portal to provide centralised and structured access to public service data online.

Lack of specifics

While the Government committed to plans in its Programme for Government, for example, to publish online ‘Every Purchase Order by a Government Department or agency for more than 20,000 online’, there is little by way of specifics in the reform plans regarding the data that will be released. A good idea might have been to setup an initial site (even a microsite of gov.ie), where citizens could suggest datasets for release – in a similar vein to data.gov.

Instead, the provision and release of Open Data is being driven by local authorities and other interested groups (e.g. DERI and their OpenData.ie site), rather than central Government. An Open Data conference held earlier this month in Galway, highlighted four local authorities as being the “poster children” of a growing worldwide movement to unlock public data.

Fingal County Council has pioneered an initiative with the three other local authorities in the capital to create a Dublinked data network. It has also established its own Open Data catalogue (which celebrated it’s first birthday recently), and is currently running an Apps4Fingal competition for ideas and apps based on this data.

Dominic Byrne of Fingal County Council, outlines the Open Data initiatives contained within these plans, and the Government’s commitment to the release of data:

..we are delighted to see the Government committing to the publishing of Open Data.  Fingal County Council looks forward to playing an active part in this next phase of Open Data in Ireland as more Irish Public Service organisations start publishing Open Data.

Nevertheless, in his analysis of the status of the Open Data movement in Ireland, Damien highlights the need for an Open Data Policy to underpin any Open Data infrastructure, and set the framework for licenses and formats. The current Reform plan does not set any dates for such a policy or directive, and does not commit to specific dates for the creation of a national Open Data portal.

Both Labour (in their Open Government Plan) and Fine Gael (in their New Politics Plan) have committed themselves to driving forward an Open Government agenda. Both plans include good initiatives and specifics in relation to empowering citizens, the creation of data.gov.ie and other accountability and transparency objectives.  The Government’s reform plan unfortunately lacks concrete commitments outlined in these plans. Thus, a more detailed Open Government plan (incorporating Open Data specifics) is required to act as a framework upon which the Public Service can build upon. The reform plan states how it wants to empower its people to lead and embrace change:

We will embed a strong culture of innovation and change across the Public Service centered on effective senior leadership and a relentless focus on results. This will enable a new Public Service equipped to meet the significant existing and future challenges through empowering its people to lead and embrace change. Above all, we must make it easier to access services and engage with Government whilst providing greatest value for money.

We’ve seen how local authorities can provide leadership in the provision of Open Data and the development of apps and services upon this . What’s needed now is an innovative Open Government plan to reform the principles upon which data is held by Government, and allow for its release and reuse by citizens. Work on such a plan/blueprint is already underway by the Enterprise Ireland National Cross Industry Working Group on Open Data. This blueprint is expected to provide advice and guidance to Government on best practices in this area. Only once these best practices are put into action should we expect to see the kind of reforms necessary to ‘embed a strong culture of innovation and change across the Public sector’.

America’s Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, talking to TechCrunch’s Andrew Keen last month on his three priorities for driving technological innovation in America.

Chopra’s three priorities include:

• Building a “smart infrastructure” for the digital age.

Well, we believe, first and foremost that we need to have a robust baseline infrastructure for the country. And to me that baseline infrastructure isn’t just roadways, railways and runways. But it includes smart infrastructure. 4G network that covers 98 percent of the country. A smart grid, a healthcare IT platform that has doctors and hospitals interconnected. And a learning technologies platform that allows schools and parents and children to communicate and learn from each other and from new resources, number one.

• Establishing “rules of the road” for critical issues like security and intellectual property protection

So as we grapple with issues of security and privacy intellectual property enforcement and the like. We need rules of the road that will comport to the 21st century, internet economy as we see it. And the President’s signature on the patent reform bill last week is just an example of the down payment in that regard.

• Overcoming the “productivity gap” to create digital jobs

We have seen for too long a productivity gap between the potential for how a technology-driven health care system, energy system, education system can operate and what it actually looks like today. McKinsey recently published a study that we can juice up productivity rates in those sectors of US economy that have not seen the kind of growth that they should. That will in turn will create jobs of the future and open up a new chapter of innovation and I’m very hopeful that the president’s strategy for American innovation, available at whitehouse.gov/innovation, answers the call on each of these key challenges that are in front of us.

Other interesting comments focused on how citizens and entrepreneurs can participate with government to improve healthcare, energy management and education:

Well, my number one goal is to inspire them [entrepreneurs] to participate in ways that we can invent a better America. That is, if you’re looking at opportunities to give back, you might be a developer at a company with some spare time and you can help us build a product or service that will improve our healthcare system, improve our energy management, improve our ability to educate our children…

We think the healthcare system is ripe for breakthroughs. We’d love for new entrepreneurs to come into the market..and help us to build that better value based healthcare system…We are increasingly attracting former entrepreneurs in the government using the notion of government as an invitation convener tool more so than  money or new laws that have to be put in place. And there’s a lot we can do together with just the role as government as convener. If you’re entrepreneur and you think there is something you want to work on today.

Chopra on the emergence of an Apps ecosystem through data sharing standards:

I’ve visited schools and families that have had kids learn better by complementing their school system with information technology fueled products and services and the energy space. This is a live issue here in California. Just last month, the California state regulators announced that they would direct three utilities in the state to come together on a common standard for how they will share energy information to customers that want it.

Imagine the apps ecosystem that will emerge. That will take my energy data from my home and convince me when I should turn out the lights and how I should manage my home energy use. Studies show that this could save anywhere from three, four, five, some even say 15 percent on our energy If we were empowered with the right information to make better decisions. So energy, healthcare, and education are top of mine priorities for us and opportunities that we believe will benefit greatly from the entrepreneurial gift system here in Silicon Valley.

(via TechCrunch)

World Bank President Robert Zoellick made a fascinating speech last month, in which he urged a sweeping new approach to development economics research. He outlined how the World Bank would change its research model to better tap into the experiences of developing countries.

The new initiative is called “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions,” and aims to make research data and analysis more easily accessible to development practitioners and policymakers.

Development Research

Referencing British philosopher David Hume, who said “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”, Zoellick questioned whether the set of data and analytic tools now available is sufficient to answer the most pressing questions facing developing countries today:

Too often the positive outcomes of research for policymakers seem to be occasional by products of research rather than its objective from the outset.

Too often research economists seem not to start with the key knowledge gaps facing development practitioners, but rather search for questions they can answer with the industry’s currently favorite tools.

He acknowledged the need for evidence-based best practice – and hand-on experience – to guide the research agenda:

We need to know what works: we need a research agenda that focuses on results. To do so, we will need to gather more evidence and data to assess the effectiveness of development efforts, including aid…

I believe we need a more practical approach —- one that is firmly grounded in the key knowledge gaps for development policy. One that is geared to the needs of policymakers and practitioners — as a primary focus, not as an academic afterthought.One that throws open the doors to all those with hands-on experience.

To this end he suggests economists, policymakers and academics should re-examine the economies of developing countries through more accessible data and use of new technologies.

There is a new opportunity, and certainly a pressing need, for a dynamism in development economics. Software has brought new tools; the Internet has brought new communications; rising economies have brought new experiences.

Open Data, but censorship of conclusions?

The Wall Street Journal and others have highlighted the debate ignited as a result of the speech. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, said Zoellick’s comments were “generally not only in the right direction, but very useful”.

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik called the speech “forthright and courageous”:

The speech hits all the right notes: the need for economists to demonstrate humility, eschew blueprints, search for differentiated solutions suited to context, learn from the actual policies of successful emerging economies, focus on evaluation but not at the expense of the big questions.

AidInfo (a non-profit concerned with making aid more transparent) also welcomed the speech:

We warmly welcome both the attitude of the World Bank towards democratising data, and the steps they are taking towards it…

Talking to donors over the last year about releasing aid data, it is striking how often they want to know exactly who will use the information and for what purpose…

We are pressing the view that donors should not see themselves as the only, or even the main, providers of information to end users; they should make it possible for other organisations to access information and provide it to people who need it.

Others, however, were more skeptical about the speech. New York University economist William Easterly, formerly of the World Bank, described the comments as “amazingly presumptuous.” He says the current system of economic research, where ideas are picked apart by other economists, works well, but World Bank researchers often make no attempt to publicize their findings, thus hindering the options for debate.

He also notes how research can be subject to censorship, and questions whether this would change with “researchers’ participation in the ‘democraticized’ debate”.

The World Bank’s chief of research, Martin Ravallion, responded saying:

I have never been told what conclusions I should reach, and I doubt very much that anyone told Bill Easterly what conclusions he should reach in his many years working for the Bank’s research department.

Indeed, Ravallion is a prominent supporter of a new kind of research platform to make it easier for anyone to interrogate development data for their own purposes.

World Bank as a Platform

Tim O’ Reilly’s oft discussed Government as a Platform is the central theme of Zoellick’s “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions” initiative. In order to make research more relevant to developing countries, the tools to enable it should be “democratized”, allowing researchers to collaborate with professionals in developing countries.

No longer can the model solely be to research a specific issue and write a paper hoping someone will read it. The new model must be “wholesale” and networked. It must increasingly open information and knowledge to others by giving them the tools to do the economic research themselves.

Martin Ravallion recently blogged about this new “wholesaling model” under which the emphasis switches to producing the tools for others to do the research and providing open access to those tools. He explained three objectives for such an initiative:

1. Empowering Researchers – to do better research to inform development policy and development practice. This changes the focus of the traditional “capacity building” model from the task of “teaching the lessons from past research” to facilitating new learning in specific contexts.
2. Collaborative Retailing model – ensuring World Bank staff and academics in rich countries can work more closely with colleagues in developing countries as full peers.
3. More open and transparent policy analysis – The Bank can play an important role in reducing the costs of understanding even the most sophisticated policy analysis, given that technical capabilities have increased among key stakeholders.

This ‘wholesaling model’, however, is predicated upon the Bank making available online much more of the information it collects on countries to help local researchers and aid workers.

The “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions,” initiative is intended to move this model further by providing a user-friendly data source, free and open to the public. Zoellick explained how this is a fundamental shift from today’s “elite retail” model of research:

This needs to be a fundamentally new way of searching for development solutions, in a networked development architecture, where none dominates and all can play a part

This new research ecosystem is intended to (my emphasis):

Open the treasure chest of the World Bank’s data and knowledge to every village health care worker, every researcher, everyone.

Today, the Bank remains the largest single source of development knowledge. But knowledge must be opened to all…

We need to democratize and demystify development economics, recognizing that we do not have a monopoly on the answers.

We need to throw open the doors, recognizing that others can find and create their own solutions. And this open research revolution is underway…

We need to recognize that development knowledge is no longer the sole province of the researcher, the scholar, or the ivory tower. It’s about the health-care worker in Chiapas recording her results; it’s about the local official posting the school budget on the classroom door so that parents can complain when their children are shortchanged; it’s about the Minister, the academician, the statistician, and the entrepreneur comparing notes on the impact of incentives.

This release of data is already underway with the World Bank’s Open Data initiative. The initiative provides information on more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development indicators. It recently tripled the amount of data on the site and introduced new and improved mapping and visualisation features to improve “data-driven decision making”.

Ravallion explains how this new model should lead to greater transparency and collaboration in the analysis of development data:

This new model for how we do research will combine open access to data with open access to the analytic tools used to inform policy discussions using those data. Our vision is that data, the knowledge and the solutions to development problems will ultimately be generated collaboratively by those who have most to gain from the success of those solutions.

Transparency

Governments, civil society organizations, aid watchdogs have all demanded greater transparency from the World Bank. Government’s around the world have also faced demands for increased openness, and have responded accordingly with open data initiatives and directives. The World Bank has faced such demands and answered these with developments such as:

• Open Data Catalog – similar to the US data.gov and UK data.gov.uk
• New Access to Information Policy – based on the US and Indian Freedom of Information Acts
• Open Forum – running parallel to the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings it will allow a global audience to participate in the event via chat forums, live blogging, Twitter, etc. (similar to the Whitehouse Open For Questions model)

It is also launching an Apps for Development Competition to encourage and identify new, innovative tools and applications using World Bank data. Such app competitions have been run by many government authorities in recent years, and have served to highlight the potential of data for the development of citizen centric web/mobile applications.

The World Bank is following the open data lead set by many governments, and making available online much more of the information it collects on countries. Zoellick understands that researchers and other professionals in the field should be able to examine the data and assumptions behind World Bank reports, and interrogate this information to draw their own conclusions. What the Sunlight Foundation does with Government data, Aidinfo and others should be able to do with World Bank data.

With this speech Zoellick has been described as a Development 2.0 advocate. The overall theme of openness, transparency and collaboration represent a fascinating change in how the World Bank views development data, and its research methodologies on aid effectiveness. Now we just need to ensure the data is of high enough quality, to remove any suggestions the initiative is – like some Government data initiatives – ‘more style than substance’.

Related

• Open Data Helps Developing Countries
• Wholesaling Research for Development
• Full webcast of Zoellick’s speech

One of the most highly publicized Open Government initiatives of the last few years got a thundering wakeup call last week, when Ellen Miller – Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation – addressed succinctly, and with hard facts, the Open Data ‘Elephant in the room’. That is, the problem of missing or wrong data, contained within Government issued data-sets.

In her Gov 2.0 Summit presentation, Miller presented an Open Government Scorecard, with some frank views on the status of the movement, and the administration’s efforts to-date.

Her central thesis is that “the drive for transparency appears stalled”. This is because of a few reasons, but most relate to the Consistency, Completeness and Timeliness of USASpending.gov, and other Obama Administration Open Government initiatives:

• On the Open Government Directive – Miller believes its objectives are teetering on the edge: ‘The plans that resulted were little more than aspirational. In the first of those plans, 12 out of 30 agencies didn’t identify any data for future publication and altogether only 75 new data sets were promised… That was hugely disappointing. Enforcement of these plans has always been ‘soft.’’
• On Data.gov - ‘It started with enormous promise…But it’s still a pretty mediocre data repository and the types of data available remains an enormous concern.
• On Recovery.gov – ‘It’s hard consider it more than a qualified success.’

Her primary focus, however, was on the federal spending website USASpending.gov – initiated by legislation from Barack Obama and Tom Coburn. Launched nearly three years ago, it was intend to provide the public with information about how the federal government spends tax dollars. Miller explains how it’s a visually impressive website, but believe the effort expanded on three extensive redesigns should have been used elsewhere. While applauding the usability of the site, her criticism centers on the substance:

Unfortunately, its data is almost completely useless…

To backup this claim ,she announced the launch of a new project called ClearSpending – which ‘tracks and illustrates just how broken the data [in USASpending] is’. The intention is that through making the problems with data quality transparent and easily identifiable, it will help improve accuracy within USASpending.gov. The problems, however, are huge:

What Sunlight has found, and Clearspending shows in great detail, is that more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from 2009 is unreliable. The data inaccuracies we uncovered account for 70 percent of the total $1.9 trillion in government spending data reported in that year. Some of the numbers are too big, some are too small and some are missing completely, while other spending data entries don’t have the detail that’s required or were reported months later than the law demands.

In her concluding remarks, she says:

The data powering USASpending is broken. You can’t trust any aggregate numbers you get from the site — answers to questions about federal spending that rise above the micro level. When we say things just don’t add up, we mean it…

We are beginning to worry that the Administration is more interested in style than substance.

‘More interested in style than substance’

This insinuation, however, has caused some in the Open Government movement to hit back, and challenge the tone of the speech. The first to address this was Gunnar Hellekson (Chief Tech Strategist for Red Hat), who pronounced the speech as ‘poisonous’, and neglecting the fact that citizens now have more information available to them than ever before:

The keynote was a remarkable turn: the administration was completely eviscerated by one of its closest allies..The fact that the US government is even attempting this is amazing.

He goes on to explain that imperfection and risk should be tolerated, and that while some of the data is ‘ridiculous’, this is one of benefits of data transparency i.e. public scrutiny:

Sunlight’s $1.3 trillion discovery is an example of the process working, not a failure…You’re just seeing how hard it is for one of the largest, most complicated organizations on the planet to keep its records straight.

His thesis is that Transparency and Open Data does not reform make. Rather, it provides the impetus and evidence based reasoning for changes to occur:

Sunlight has, I think, dangerously conflated transparency for reform. You get transparency first, and that compels reform. That’s the whole point. You don’t ask for perfection right out of the gate, it’s unreasonable….The solution is a long, difficult, complicated, and unpleasant series of reforms that produce better quality data. That requires patience, diligence, perseverance.

In Sunlight’s response, they agree that while perfection is the enemy of the good, many of the totals are not even close. They highlight that ClearSpending reveals 70% of the totals analysed were flawed. As such, Sunlight’s Tom Kitt worries it has to potential to ‘mislead a lot of people’, and affect trust in the entire initiative. In the end, his primary concern relates to timescales and the lack of urgency from OMB and GSA in fixing the data systems powering USASpending.

Tough love in the Open Government movement

Nevertheless, Gunnar recognises that “Sunlight has done the right thing here by doing real and substantial work”, others believe they’ve gone too far in calling out the emperor’s clothes. Derek Willis believes that:

Sunlight hasn’t earned the right to say that the government is “more interested in style than substance”.

This is because “It’s about the process, the culture, an entirely new way of doing things”. So rather than believing in the data, what’s more important is the site, the initiative, and the changes/legislation/directives that have facilitated this analysis. To coin an equestrian analogy (as Nancy Scola does when she says Sunlight are “prodding the Obama administration in the direction that it want it to go, like you do with a horse”); it’s better to bet on the horse, than the race.

In the end, he and others recognise the objective of the initiative, but perhaps feel more recognition is needed as to the success in creating platforms where all this data can be critiqued:

I’m grateful that organizations like Sunlight are pushing for greater access to accurate public data…But just as government processes can seem alien and counterproductive at times, so can those of transparency advocates.

Data accuracy – a shared issue

One of the most interesting aspects of ClearSpending, is not that it calls out agencies on data quality (this has been highlighted many times before), but rather that such an in-depth analysis could be undertaken in the first place.

Sunlight evaluated the data quality based on a methodology that has been used by the Government Accounting Office , and checked data against the Federal Awards and Assistance Data System. This kind of reconciliation helped to create ClearSpending, and is useful when understanding how other datasets could be checked.

The quality of procurement data released by governments is not just a US issue. When the UK government released extracts of the Combined On-line Information System (COINS), containing expenditure by UK Government Departments over £25K for the years 2008-2010, the guidance document explained (my emphasis):

The data on COINS are quality-assured and complete at the level at which they are required for the following purposes: fiscal management; operational publications (e.g. Main and Supplementary Estimates); and statistical publications (e.g. Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the joint ONS/Treasury Public Sector Finances statistical bulletin and the National Accounts).

Lower levels of data are not quality assured by the Treasury. Individual departments can to some extent choose the level of granularity that they use within pre-defined aggregates set by the Treasury. Lower level detailed data may therefore appear incomplete and be inconsistent across departments.

While, this did at least explain how some lower level data may-not be accurate, the guidance for local authority spending has no such caveats. This guidance, published on Friday, provides details for local government on how to comply with the Prime Minister’s call to publish each financial transaction over £500 from January 2011.

The guidance makes no remarks as to the quality of the data released. The principle stated is to ‘Publish raw data quickly’, rather than to try to make sure it’s accurate first. Indeed, Tim-Berners-Lee’s “Putting Government Data online” – to which the guidance refers – makes no mention of data quality either. It appears, that the emphasis is on publishing data – in any format (39% published their spending in PDF format only) – rather than checking its consistency or accuracy.

The remit of the recently initiated UK Public Data Transparency Board is to ensure tight deadlines are met for releasing key datasets, and that open data standards are adhered to. Their draft Public Data Principles make no mention of data accuracy or integrity. As such, it looks like this task – to ensure data accuracy – falls to the Gov 2.0 community. As Ellen Miller says:

For starters, we have to take on some of the responsibility for making this happen ourselves – I mean ‘us’ as in the community of Americans [read British] who are concerned about accountability…

Our job is to hold the Administration’s [read Coalition/Local Government's] feet to the fire – bureaucrats aren’t going to act just because someone asks nicely. Government isn’t going to change how and when it makes data available – even when a few good people on the inside want it to – because of a directive…

And finally, we need to admit that Gov2.0 isn’t happening until citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it.

For the promise of Gov 2.0 to be realised someone is going to have to undertake the less glamorous tasks of checking data accuracy and verifying it against available datasources. Achieving this should not be a case of carrots or sticks, but should be up to government themselves. They should want to achieve high data quality standards, because it helps them, and furthers the purpose of the Gov 2.0 mission. When this happens, we’ll know that the Gov 2.0 movement has achieved an important milestone. Getting there won’t happen, however, until as Miller says “citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it”. Now where’s that Open Data Quality bandwagon?

Related:

• Is Open Government Closing? (includes full video of Miller’s speech and interview with O’Reilly’s Alex Howard)

(Photo credit: smcgee on Flickr)

Promoting innovation through prizes and challenges has steadily become an accepted policy throughout many US government departments and agencies over the past few years. Consequently, research into what does and does not work, in the development of such initiatives is increasing important in advancing best practice in this area.

Earlier this year, the Case Foundation together with the White House Domestic Policy Council and Office on Science and Technology Policy, hosted a Promoting Innovation Summit to gather lessons and strategies on the use of prizes, challenges and open grant-making.

Benefits to using prizes and challenges

In his opening remarks, Jeff Zients, the nation’s first Chief Performance Officer, pointed to the transformative power of prizes and challenges:

The productivity boom has transformed private sector performance over the past decade, but the federal government has missed out on this transformation and lags far behind in terms of efficiency and service quality. The American taxpayer deserves more bang for their buck.

Earlier this year, Zients’ office prepared a memo giving guidance to heads of executive departments and agencies on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government. The memo outlines a number of benefits of such initiatives as tools for promoting open government, innovation, and other national priorities. These include:

• The ability to establish an important goal without having to choose the approach or the team that is most likely to succeed
• Enables sponsors to pay only for results
• Highlights excellence in a particular domain of human endeavor to motivate, inspire and guide others
• Increases the number and diversity of individuals, organizations and teams that are addressing a particular problem or challenge of national or international significance
• Improves the skills of the participants in the competition
• Stimulates private sector investment that is many times greater than the cash value of the prize
• Attracts more interest and attention to a defined program, activity or issue of concern
• Captures the public imagination and changes the public’s perception of what is possible

Challenge.gov

The memo also explained, how the federal government would make available a web-based platform for prizes and challenges. This would be used to support agencies in their execution of prizes:

This platform will provide a forum for agencies to post problems and invite communities of problem solvers to suggest, collaborate on, and deliver solutions. Over the longer term, the General Services Administration (GSA) will also provide government-wide services to share best practices and assist agencies in developing guidelines for issuing challenges. Additionally, GSA will develop, as expeditiously as possible, a contract vehicle to provide agency access to relevant products and services, including technical assistance in structuring and conducting contests to take maximum benefit of the marketplace as they identify and pursue contest initiatives to further the policy objectives of the Federal Government.

This platform – called Challenge.gov – recently went live to federal employees, and the General Services Administration (GSA) will open it to the public later this month. GSA explained the concept behind the site:

Challenge.gov is a new platform that allows federal agencies to post challenges, and at the same time, allows the public to find federal challenges. It’s now open to federal agencies to create challenges or showcase challenges from other platforms.

The platform behind Challenge.gov – ChallengePost – is already used by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Apps For Healthy Kids contest site. This has over 40,000 supporters and around 100 apps worth an estimated are worth over $5 million dollars. In exchange it is making $60k available in prizes.

Do’s and Don’ts

The Promoting Innovation report below is a summary of the lessons and shared learning discussed at the conference, and highlights some of the shining examples of the power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation.

Whilst prizes and challenges can be powerful tools in driving change, the report highlights some definite Do’s and Don’ts. These include:

• Problems must be clearly defined with measurable outcomes and objective rules.
• Agencies must make sure authority and budgets are in place -  The Office of Management and Budget has recently issued guidance for agencies that are considering using prizes and challenges as a part of their fulfillment of the Open Government Directive.
• Challenges should be open and transparent – Agencies should not underestimate the effort it can take to ensure fairness amongst participants.
• Prizes don’t have to be money – The report notes how ‘a non-monetary prize that creates recognition can stimulate innovation – as can a contest that promises winning ideas will actually be used.’ As part of this, it highlights the President’s SAVE award in which the federal employee submitting the winning idea was given the opportunity to present the idea to President Obama in person, and have their idea included in the 2011 budget.
• Use the public for the right purpose – The are stories of inappropriate ideas rising to the surface of contests as the result of groups gaming a voting system or for other reasons. The UK’s Spending Challenge has been plagued by such issues, although it’s outcome is hailed a success by some.  The report suggests “voting systems often result in the most creative solutions being dismissed. It is not clear that making final evaluations is the right use of Web 2.0 tools when it comes to such contests”.

Challenges to implementation

The Promoting Innovation report, also highlights some of the key challenges agencies can face in introducing prizes and challenges. These include how to handle failure if the results are not what was expected, ensuring internal capacity and skills are available to administer such initiatives and managing the internal change associated with using prizes and awards to further policy goals.

While some of these concerns maybe mitigated through the use of Challenge.gov, McKinsey’s research on prizes highlights some of their limits and cautions against their use versus other philanthropic instruments. They explain that prizes are a good fit if there is a clear and achievable goal, and many solvers willing to absorb the risk of the effort:

Are there limits to the effective use of prizes? Of course! Good ones require clear objectives, a rich field of potential problem solvers, and competitors willing to take risks. Prizes work best when a field isn’t already flooded with funded research and the challenge is more to create a clever application of technology than a technology itself.

A rule of thumb holds that prizes are useful tools for solving problems for which the objective is clear, but the way to achieve it is not. By attracting diverse talent and a range of potential solutions, prizes draw out many possible solutions, many of them unexpected, and steer the effort in directions that established experts might not go but where the solution may nonetheless lie.

Along with this, Zients’ memo outlines many legal issues to be addressed by agencies in structuring prize competitions. These include compliance with Federal Advisory Committee Act legislation, Ethical issues and federal endorsement of products or services, Intellectual Property and many others.

Mindful of these concerns, Tom Kalil, Director White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained how agencies have the strong support of the President and OMB to use prizes and challenges as catalysts for innovation and policy formation:

I hope everyone who is here from the Federal Departments and Agencies will come away from this with a renewed sense that this is an important tool, that you will go back and talk to 5-10 of your colleagues to get them excited about this, and that if you run into people who say no you can’t do this, show them the OMB memo, show them that this is in the President’s Innovation Strategy, and know that you have not just permission to do this, but a strong affirmation from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, from the National Economic Council, [and] … from the OMB General Counsel’s Office.

Promoting Innovation Doc

Vivek Kundra on Prizes and Challenges

For more check:

• Summit keynote and panel videos, along with other interviews from the event.
• McKinsey report: And the winner is…Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes
• Peter Corbett on How to create a civic innovation contest