“If you read only one blog in the Gov 2.0 space, you should read eaves.ca” – Tim O’Reilly.
My interview with David Eaves on open government and open data at today’s Gov 2.0 Summit is a reminder why my publisher would offer that ringing endorsement. We talked about the risks and rewards of open data, the state of Gov 2.0 in Canada and the progress of “We government” up across the border. Eaves also revealed that Canadians love Facebook, though perhaps not as much as hockey.
How will regulations and laws that address the new challenges of online privacy evolve? What are the tradeoffs between societal benefit and individual rights? How should the opportunities inherent in data mining be balanced with harm-based standards? What are the responsibilities of governments, businesses and citizens to protect privacy?
Yesterday at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, my interview with Jules Polonetsky covered all of those topics and more. Polonestsky is the Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank seeking to improve the state of online privacy by advancing responsible data practices. His writing and research can be found at Futureofprivacy.org.
Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talk about some lessons for the public sector from her experience in the business of technology, particularly around distributed collaboration using video conferencing. “The power of video is that it really allows us to extend the abstract notions of text-based technology and replaces that with much more human way of communicating,” said Warrior. “It’s more natural.”
Warrior, who went to Russia this past winter on a State Department “TechDel,” leveraged telepresence to collaborate with her fellow travelers after they dispersed. She’ll be talking more about more about similar lessons from the private sector in her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview at Radar on Monday.
Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talk about technology and business in Russia. Warrior traveled to Russia this past winter on a TechDel with the State Department, looking for connections through digital diplomacy.
I’m very much looking forward to her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit on private sector lessons that translate to the public sector next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview at Radar on Monday.
Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talked about on the use of telepresence in government – over telepresence – and the opportunities around teleworking.
I’m very much looking forward to her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit on private sector lessons that translate to the public sector next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview on Monday.
We also talked about the role of technology in natural disasters. An excerpt from that conversation is embedded below:
What Warrior and I didn’t discuss then, with respect to the floods in Pakistan, is the CrisisCommons Marathon Weekend that begins today. It’s an international effort that spans the globe, from Canada to London to Bangkok to Sydney, leveraging the distributed efforts of concerned citizens and technology to provide aid in the massive disaster. For more information – and to help – consult the links below:
We will be working to assist our friends and partner organizations: OpenStreetMap, Sahana and Crowdmap (Ushahidi). Each individual city may also be working on tasks listed on the CrisisCommons wiki for pkfloods.
We’ll be working in a number of countries and timezones with staggered over three days. CrisisCamps in Canada and CrisisCamp Virtual will start on the evening of Friday, September 3, 2010. This is the same start time for CrisisCamp Sydney where the time will be Saturday, September 4, 2010 : 08:00 AEST. As we collaborate work across North America, we will run overnight and link to the CrisisCamp London team. The Canadian and Uk teams finish on Saturday, September 4, 2010 while the Sydney team will continue throughout Sunday, September 5, 2010.
Register for the Sydney, Australia CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST
Join CrisisCamp Bangkok for Saturday, September 4, 2010
Register for the Toronto, Canada CrisisCamp: Friday, September 3, 2010: 18:00 ET
Join Silicon Valley on Friday, September 3, 2010 5-10pm Pacific Time at 650 Castro, Mountain View
Register for the London, UK CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4,2010: 10am GMT
Join us virtually:
Can social media, open government and an API lead to a better pill identification system? What about a collaborative effort between Big Pharma and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that could result in pictures of medications on labels for the first time?
As David Hale’s interview in my most recent article at Mashable showed, the power of social media, open data and innovation led to a better healthcare platform at the National Library of Medicine:
Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.
Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.
In the video below, Hale demonstrates the platform:
Hale will share more about new updates to Pillbox and how the healthcare community and developers partnering to restructure federal drug label data at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week in Washington on September 8th.
His last presentation, “Open Gov Ninja 101,” is embedded below:
Earlier today, my newest Radar post explained what to expect as FCC.gov is poised for an overdue overhaul featured FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel on participation and building platforms. For the full perspective on what’s next in “FCC 2.0,” check out Radar. Our video interview is embedded below.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Managing Director Steven VanRoekel will discuss their experiences turning FCC.gov into a 21st-century consumer resource at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. (Sept. 7-8). Request an invitation.
http://www.viddler.com/simple/dbed5110/
Earlier this summer, the Knight Foundation convened a panel of experts on open source and open government at the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT to consider whether open data can be used to fuel positive social change. If you missed the event or video when it was first posted, it’s well worth your time.
From the Knight Blog:
Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, Laurel Ruma, editor at O’Reilly Media, and Nick Grossman, director of Civic Works at OpenPlans, each gave a brief speech and answered topical questions. Although each speaker expressed different ideas about how to foster civic engagement and social change, their strategies all revolved around a similar theme: transparency. The speakers agreed that social change can be fostered by increasing the amount of quality data available and correspondence between residents and their governments.
Miller will be presenting an Open Government Scorecard at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week. It’s a good bet that John Wonderlich’s post on the White House leading practice winners might serve as a preview of her comments.
Yesterday, I reported on how the United States federal government plans to approach crowdsourcing national challenges with the new Challenge.gov at ReadWriteWeb. As I wrote there, Challenge.gov is the latest effort in the evolution of collaborative innovation in open government.
Should the approach succeed, challenges and contests have the potential to leverage the collective expertise of citizens, just as apps contests have been used to drive innovation in D.C. and beyond.
In the interview below, Bev Godwin and Brandon Kessler explain what Challenge.gov is and what it might do. Kessler is the founder of ChallengePost, the platform that Challenge.gov is built upon.
I interviewed Godwin and Kessler in August, when senior government officials and private sector enjoyed a preview of Challenge.gov at the Newseum at the second annual Fedscoop forum on reducing the cost of government. The following excerpts from their panels offer more insight into how challenges work, how they’ve been used in the private sector and what results citizens might anticipate as this approach to open government moves forward.
Kessler defines a challenge.
Bev Godwin discusses the importance and value of challenges to the government.
Brandon Kessler discusses the results he has seen from challenges.
Michael Donovan, Chief Technologist, Strategic Capabilities, HP, explains how he would classify different types of challenges.
Dean Halstead, collaboration architect at Microsoft, discusses how he would classify different types of challenges.
Dr. Jeffrey Davis, director of space life sciences at NASA, talks about the return on investment shown by some of the challenges he has run or been involved with.
Dr. Jeffrey Davis explores the characteristics of a good challenge.
Dean Halstead explains how Microsoft leverages challenges.
Michael Donovan explains how HP leverages challenges.
Challenge.gov “is the next form of citizen engagement, beyond participation to co-creation,” said Godwin at the Newseum. Many questions remain about how the effort will be received. Will citizens show up? Will challenges see participation from industry leaders and the innovators in the private sector? Will intellectual property rights be clearly and fairly addressed up front and afterwards, in a sustainable way? Will Congress pass legislation enshrining this approach to open government?
The answers to most of those questions, in other words, will often not be driven by legal or technological challenges. Instead, the results will have to be used to drive acquisition, civic empowerment or even more data-driven policy. Opening the doors of government to innovation will not be easy. Whether these efforts can spur the evolution of a more efficient, innovative government in the 21st Century may be the most difficult challenge to win of all.
Could contests help us realize the vision of participatory democracy outlined by Thomas Jefferson, where citizens collaborate with government to solve the nation’s most difficult problems? The White House hopes so. As the Federal Times reported this morning, agencies are trying to crowdsource their way out of problems.
These efforts won’t always work out as proponents might hope. To date, crowdsourcing government reform has had mixed results. The new British government’s first crowdsourcing attempt fails to alter Whitehall line. And as Wired’s Jeff Home observed last year, crowdsourcing and the President were a “failed marriage” when the new administration tried its first online town hall.
That said, in April the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) began requesting public input on how to implement President Obama’s innovation strategy, which calls for new ways to foster economic growth and create high-quality jobs.
“Government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas,” as Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first federal chief information officer, has emphasized repeatedly. To deliver on the promise of innovation for “government as a platform,” as Tim O’Reilly has framed the concept of “government 2.0,” the White House will have to find ways to empower citizens to contribute to the formation and delivery of effective and efficient policy and services.
The idea of a contest to inspire technological innovation, however, is not a novel concept reliant on Web services, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.
What has inspired the use of the contests? “There are a number of sources,” said Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy at OSTP. “The organization that gets the most credit for the renaissance in the use of prizes is the X Prize Foundation. The Ansari X Prize and its success was one of the things that got me excited about the potential of these challenges.” Kalil joined Tim O’Reilly and Lesa Mitchell from the Kauffman Foundation next week at the Gov 2.0 Summit to talk about turbocharging American innovation. Their conversation is embedded below:
“We created Apps for Democracy with Vivek Kundra and Office of the Chief Technology Officer back in 2008,” said Peter Corbett, CEO of Washington, D.C.-based iStrategy Labs. “[Kundra] said ‘Peter, we have all this open data–it’s probably the most comprehensive municipal open data catalog in the world–but it’s not really useful to anybody because it’s just raw data.”
What Corbett suggested to Kundra was to encourage citizen technologists to build Web applications and mobile services on top of that data. “Build on top of that catalog for fame — and a little bit of fortune.” Within two months, they had 47 Web, mobile and iPhone applications developed. Since then, that method and concept has spread throughout the world, said Corbett. The Department of Defense recently announced the winners of the Apps for Army contest, which could shape the future of defense acquisition.
Apps contests are not just a phenomenon in the United States, either: in Canada, an Apps for Climate Change contest just wrapped up. And in Africa, Apps for Africa is focused on leveraging the talent of local developers in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.
“There are ‘Apps for Democracy’ contests in Finland, in Australia and ones on the city level like Portland, New York and London,” said Corbett, highlighting the spread of the paradigm globally. Later this year, an Apps for Development contest will leverage an even bigger open data store soon too, explained Corbett, based upon the World Bank’s open data catalog.
While apps contests may be unlocking government innovation, more recently Corbett has focused his technical evangelism on moving beyond apps contests, to building communities of developers. That’s a focus that former Sunlight Labs director Clay Johnson would endorse, as evidenced by his post on building communities, not apps contests. One bellwether for the success of the method for unlocking innovation may be the results of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, which is focused upon engaging the development community to make community health data as useful as weather data through developing healthcare apps.
For more perspective, make sure to read Mark Headd here at Govfresh on his “glass half full” view of government app contests, and the thoughts from former DC CTO Bryan Sivak on government app contests moving from cool to useful.
A recent McKinsey article on the promise of innovation held by prize contests offered further instruction, noting that “most successful prize competitions place an equal emphasis on other elements, such as the broader change strategy, the competition itself, and post-award activities designed to enhance the impact of the prize.”
Kalil agreed with that assessment, observing that a strategy that specifies victory conditions is useful. “That’s why a clear goal, like ‘build a spaceship that can go up 200km, and then repeat that within two weeks,’ is helpful,” he said.
Will hardwiring prizes that leverage public sector investments provide a good return on the commitment of time, prize money and other resources?
“We’re finding that to be the case with the NASA Centennial Challenges Program,” said Kalil. “If NASA had had to pay for all of the capabilities created by the Lunar Lander Challenge, they would have had to put in far more money.”
Corbett said that for D.C., the city estimated the value of the first Apps for Democracy program was in excess of $2.3 million dollars, when compared to the traditional costs associated with procurement and development.
Other early results are also promising. “The government is still in early days with respect to its use of prizes,” said Kalil. “The agencies most involved have been NASA and its prizes. DARPA, particularly the DARPA Grand Challenge, have played an important role in advanced unmanned ground vehicles and robotics. The DARPA Network Challenge showed the power of social networks to gather information in a distributed way.”
Riley Crane, a MIT post-doctoral fellow, shares insights on crowdsourcing from his team’s success in the DARPA Network Challenge below. The interview came after his testimony at a recent Senate hearing on technological innovation and government.
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/8698606?v3=1
The success or failure of these challenges and contests may ultimately rest upon the ability of the White House to draw the attention of innovators to the questions posed. Should we expect a live American Idol panel to judge the potential of ideas?
Kalil laughed: “That will depend on the competition.”
There are already dozens of challenges online at the new Challenge.gov today. Below, Bev Godwin from the General Services Administration talks about the new site:
Contests aren’t the only platform that government entities are looking to in order to spur collaborative innovation. Another platform for communication will come from Expert Labs, a non-profit independent lab that is affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The open source ThinkUp App being developed by award-winning author Gina Trapani will be used by the White House as a crowdsourcing platform for collecting feedback on grand challenges that are submitted on Twitter.
“This first attempt is about whether we can get people to push the button,” said Anil Dash, director of Expert Labs. “The next attempt will be about seeing if we can get them to contribute to something larger, like a collaborative document.”
Dash said that to be successful, people developing these tools need know what they want to achieve at the outset. “You have to have a purpose-built tool,” he said. “You have to tap into as large of a network as possible, and you need to clearly define the outcome you want.”
Will it be possible to draw attention to huge, difficult problems using social media and the Internet? “Look at the number of people that have watched Bill Gates’ TED talk on zero carbon,” said Dash. “You don’t need to get everyone in the world to agree. It’s a matter of activating the people who want to contribute. It’s about getting the doers to do.”
In the video below, you can learn more about Think Up App from Dash and Trapani’s talk at the recent Supernova Hub conference.
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/8591838?v3=1
For more perspective, see Adriel Hampton’s recent interview on Gov 2.0 Radio, “Getting the BrightIdea: Crowdsourcing in government and enterprise.”
E Pluribus Unum 