Results tagged “Apps for Democracy” from FastGov: Where Government is Going

In criss crossing the country talking with government technologists and business managers, I have been highlighting the experiment in co-creation of useful things by the District of Columbia.  You will remember earlier posts about the all-skate data mashup that was Apps for Democracy.  After 30 days of frenetic activity, the contest netted 47 new applications submitted by what might be best called "citizen developers," second cousins to citizen journalists (bloggers) who work in binary code rather than words.

These citizen developers are in growing demand. In fact, the federal government's launch of Data.gov this week came with a non-profit collaborative chaser.  Nisha Thompson, Organizer and Outreach Coordinator with the Sunlight Foundation, dropped me a note earlier today:

You have been blogging about Apps for Democracy so I wanted to let you
know about the Sunlight Foundation's new contest Apps for America: The
Data.gov Challenge.  As you might know Data.gov was launched today.  To
take advantage of the new information available in friendly formats we
wanted to challenge developers to make creative applications.  

You can see the contest information here:
http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/appsforamerica2/.

This is a wonderful, one-time opportunity to show the administration
the good that follows when they make information free. So we need to
seize it. And everyone's help in getting the word out is key.  At the
end of the day, the more great entries the Apps for America contest
receives, the more likely government is to release more data - and the
more data government releases the more transparent, accountable, and
efficient it can be.

As it happens, Apps for America has become a regular part of our conversations out on the road but had not made it to a blog entry yet -- at least until now.  The Data.gov challenge comes with over $20,000 in prize money -- it is what competition in the phrase friendly competition.  The coding commences immediately with the announcement of winners expected at the end of summer.

For its part, Apps for Democracy is back with what it is calling the Community Edition.  The sequel adds the dimension of community-based requirements definition -- that is, asking the people of DC what they would like -- during May, followed by a month of application development during June.  Not insignificantly, they have found another $35,000 in prize money.  There is even a code jam on June 6-7.  Details are available on its website.

The similarly named initiatives do a number of things that are important.  It is a real world test for the open source community and an opportunity for it to prove its worth in making government more transparent and the data it holds more useful.  It is also a test for governments to explore the possibility of engaging citizens where they naturally congregate -- on social networks and around the small glowing screens of their iPhones.

As the open government or transparency movement shifts from the historic focus on public records to data, these feed-driven apps begin to show us what can happen when public data are actually public.

The CTO Summit wraps up today in San Diego.  It continues to be home to great conversation among a group of state and local technology executives that rarely have the opportunity to meet face-to-face and discuss issues of common concern and interest.

To kick start the conversation, I borrowed a page from Harvard Business Review and offered (however immodestly) what should be the four corners of their next strategy.  The presentation is available here and the accompanying videos are available from the Renovation Nation companion site.

A pair of Bronze Medal Award Winners from Washington, DC's Apps for Democracy competition picked up additional honors on Friday night by picking up the People's Choice awards.

The District's new Car Pool Mashup attracted 22 percent of the 3,320 votes and DC Bikes took another 13 percent.

It could be that all of this only matters to a small band of Birkenstock-wearing, open source-coding, Obama-voting, Inconvenient Truth-watching, Latte-drinking residents in Washington, DC or it could foreshadow the democratization of government-held data and the applications that make them useful.  Nothing against the former, but I'm betting on the latter.

The answer is in: what do you get from 260 data feeds and $20,000 in prize money?  The District of Columbia says you get 30 days of frenetic activity and 47 applications that mash up public data in ways that government itself may never had the time, inclination and impulse to develop themselves.  Such are the results of an aptly named competition, Apps for Democracy, which all but wrapped up round one today.

The winners range from the useful to the quirky and all point to the potential of democratizing data.  They all put the individual at the center of the transaction, which may be progress enough in rethinking the relationship between citizens and their government.

Here is a briefly annotated tour of the top two tiers of award winners:

Gold (Independent)

iLive.at - Doing errands in DC will never be the same.

Gold (Agency)

DC Historic Tours -- A walking tour planner, powered by a Google Maps-Flikr-Wikipedia mashup, minimizes steps and maximizes experience

Silver (Independent)

Park It DC -- fighting the constant circling, the unnecessary meter plugging and even expensive tickets that come with finding a parking spot in DC.

Where's My Money? DC -- The buck stops at a Facebook Forum on public expenditures, procurement and accountability.

DC Crime Finder -- Ripped from the databases, not the headlines -- a customizable look at crime in the neighborhood.

Silver (Agency)

Stumble Safely -- Making the streets of DC safe for pub crawls.

PointAbout Alerts -- an iPhone app makes crime reports, building permits and other civic  data location-aware in that you see the stuff that is closest to you first

We the People Wiki -- An editable Vox populi for our Web 2.0 times, embedding the voice (or keystrokes) of the people through an editable, peer-led community reference website based on Washington, D.C. public data.

The full list of winners is available at the Apps for Democracy Medal Winner page, which comes complete with the opportunity to vote on the People's Choice award -- and the polls for which remain open until Friday, November 14 at 7PM EST.

The medal winners and the honorable mentions (which are all other entrants for their willingness to innovate, compete and collaborate) are all open source and all are offered to others for refinement and reuse.  Perhaps more importantly, they keep hope alive for redeeming the reputation of a discredited phrase, your tax dollars at work.

The judges are sequestered in an undisclosed location with an array of laptops, iPhones and other devices to decide who has done the best job mashing up the District of Columbia's data. 

The Apps for Democracy program is detailed in previous posts on internal catalysts and the use of cash incentives.

The results will be summarized here in an updated post as the results are known, with the details available at Apps for Democracy as soon as the $20,000 in award money is allocated.

The answer is in the room.  The room, in this case, was a discussion of changing the way government works at the conclusion of re:public VII: a gathering of those who choose to lead, an invitation-only event convened in Tucson, AZ by e.Republic's Center of Digital Government.

The answer is in the room, taken more broadly, recognizes the power and potential of internal initiative in changing the way organizations work.

As a case in point, Veterans Day came with a pair of announcements that new veterans-only social networks were launching, not by upstart newcomers but by incumbents that have been protecting and promoting the interests of veterans -- Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, working with the Ad Council, launched CommunityofVeterans.org on Tuesday and the Veterans of Foreign Wars brought www.myvetworks.com online this week too.

But that may be just scratching the surface.  Back in the room in Tucson, the assembled panel had all gone deeper in their respective jurisdictions.  Here are brief summaries of their case stories:

On the Spot: Open Source and Authority to Change

Vivek Kundra, CTO for the District of Columbia, says formal cross-agency agreements to surface and share data has made it possible to democratize DC's data -- for the good of the District and democracy itself.

It has resulted in the surfacing of 260 data feeds across DC government and a 30 percent reduction in requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As noted in an earlier post, the internal initiative to create the 260 feeds was a necessary precondition to creating Apps for Democracy, the $20,000 competition to mashup the District's data.

This final judging is slated for this Thursday but the contest has attracted a steady stream (with at least one developed every day) of open source apps for platforms from Facebook to iPhones Apps -- including ones that let you know when the next metro train is coming, give you real time notification of crimes and disturbances in progress or allow you to customize tour routes in the DC based on your interests.

Kundra says the Apps for Democracy is part of a deliberate process to rethink the way government is done and in which "citizens and NGOs co-create" the future with and for government.

Kundra says that a future of that time involves confronting entrenched bureaucracies.  He asked for and received the authority to make hiring offers on the spot -- successfully attracting 100 new people into public service that would have otherwise been snapped up by the private sector before government-as-usual could act. A more startling HR move is a parallel mechanism for showing others to the door.  The district has also implemented daily performance reviews to identify people who are simply not working (out) and get them off the public payroll.  The daily performance checks enforce expectations that everybody gets something done everyday.  If you are not getting it done, you have until tomorrow or the next day to start.  And if you never start, your employment ends.

Building an Arc

The City of Sacramento, CA, is partnering with Westinghouse to vaporize and monetize trash.  So says Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge who, upon first meeting, appears to be the kind of guy who has a well thumbed first edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Listen a little longer and it becomes clear that he could write Zen and the Art of Repairing Government.

Kerridge enthusiastically detailed joint plans between the city (with a 5% percent ownership stake) and Westinghouse (the majority owner at 95%) to build earth's largest Plasma arc gasification plant.  Riiight, as in Bill Cosby's Noah.

Wikipedia helpfully describes Plasma arc gasification as "a waste treatment technology that uses high electrical energy and high temperature created by an electrical arc gasifier. This arc breaks down waste primarily into elemental gas and solid waste slag, in a device called a plasma converter. The process has been intended to be a net generator of electricity, depending upon the composition of input wastes, and to reduce the volumes of waste being sent to landfill sites."  Right.

That is exactly what Kerridge says the sacred northern California city will do.  Gone will be the expense of trucking Sacramento's garbage to far away landfills.  What's more, the scheme will redeem slag's good name because in this new brownish green economy, slag has economic value and a new name -- feed stock.

And Sacramento produces 5,000 tons of feed stock every day, which they will be able to sell as the raw resource for the gasifier.  The stuff that comes out of the gasifier has added value in the making of green products.  Under the agreement, Sacramento will get a cut of that too.  If that wasn't enough, Kerridge says the city is also looking at the possibility at taking garbage off of other cities (for a fee), provide it as feeder stock (for a fee) and take a third fee for its share of the value-added products.

Amid looks of disbelief and furious note taking in the room, Kerridge -- whose voice still carries a residual British accent -- reminded the audience of an old saying from his native England, "Where there is muck there is money."  The new world translation will be worth watching.

The Education Dividend

The Commonwealth of Virginia's strategic partnerships on infrastructure (Northrop Grumman) and enterprise applications (CGI) are credited for bringing hope to hard scrabble southwest Virginia.  The collaborations are on track to help create 700 jobs.  But the opportunities surface problems of their own -- what if the jobs go begging for want of workers with the needed education and skills? 

For all his work on creating and sheparding the partnerships, Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra loves the challenge that comes with these more complex, stickier questions.  The first part of the state's response is called plugGED In (notice how GED is imbedded in the name) which combines adult literacy, skills assessment, and workforce development.

Thanks to internal initiative, the commonwealth was able to stand the program up in only 6 months.  But they did not do it alone, particularly in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) where the education gap was particularly pronounced.

Virginia reached out to a non-profit "open course" start-up, the CK Foundation, which describes itslef this way on its website:

Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

Generating and adapting content relevant to a local context was exactly what is plugGED In needed. Chopra says they issued an open call for contributors and collaborators for their own untextbook that focused on the skills the commonwealth sought to develop.  They received responses from over the country, with would-be collaborators ranging from an 11th grader to major research universities.  The result: a custom open source physics flex book that will be available in February 2009, which Chopra proudly points out is the speed that the market needs and puts the conventional textbook industry to shame.

On the exit question, the panel offered a few random elements on the secrets to change that you can believe in -- and get done:

• Be bold enough to take on entrenched bureaucracies (and have the necessary air cover from your appointing authority in place before you hit the streets);
• Convince your people that their lives will be better;
• Remember that attorneys answer the questions that they are asked -- "what are the barriers to doing this?" gets a very different answer than "how can we do this?";
  
• Push innovation down as far as it can go in the organization.  Innovation is embraced downstream when the people in the trenches believe its theirs;
• Create a war room to prosecute the change with military-style discipline -- but only build a war room if you are relentless about it and willing to stake your career on it; and,
• Remember that innovation cannot come at the cost of consistent and reliable service delivery -- blocking and tackling on the front lines buys permission to keep working on the next new thing just behind the curtain.

There is a lot here to digest, and this summary may not have done their cases justice.  Expect a return to some of these ideas in subsequent posts.  And your thoughts are welcome and encouraged by adding your comments below.

In late 2004, SpaceShipOne took the original $10 million X Prize.  Right now, 60 teams from nine countries are chasing the Automotive X-Prize to build a vehicle that gets 100 miles to the gallon.  This one is motivated by green -- as in sustainability and as in another $10 million.

In January 2005, in the wake of the big SpaceShipOne win, I mused about the prospects of an the X or Next Prize for government on the back page of Government Technology magazine. At the time, it seemed that there were two central questions:

First, could there be an X Prize for government transformation? Funding the monetary prize would be no trivial challenge, but the hard part actually may be giving it away. Myriad ethics rules intended to stop public officials from doing the wrong thing also erect barriers to doing the right thing.

The second question is the more interesting one: What "Holy Grail" might an X Prize for government transformation tackle? What would your staff say it should be? What would the citizens you serve say? It's a conversation worth having (even in the absence of a cash prize) because it helps focus on things you and your colleagues would do if you weren't so busy lurching from crisis to crisis.

The conversation begins by finishing a sentence that traces its origins, appropriately enough, to the days when the space program was the gold standard of innovation and problem solving: "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we ...?"

Four years later, Vivek Kundra, the Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia Government -- as in Washington, DC -- has begun to answer those questions with an open invitation to "mashup DC's data."

It as an X prize on a budget -- with $20,000 up for grabs for public agencies and independent developers to share.  According to the official rules:

[The competition] will feature 60 cash prizes from $2000 to $100 dollars for a total of $20,000 in prizes. Developers and designers will compete by creating web applications, widgets, Google Maps mash-ups, iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and other digital utilities that visualize DC's Data Catalog, which provides real-time data from multiple agencies to citizens -- a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations.

The program is called Apps for Democracy: An Innovation Challenge and comes complete with a video introduction.  The name is rooted in a personal and philosphical conviction about the relationship between government and the people it serves, as Kundra explains in this blog entry:

In ancient Athens--the model for the democracy envisioned by the framers of our Constitution-citizens met, face to face, in the agora--the public square-to conduct business, debate civic issues, and drive the decisions of government. Gone are the days of daily meetings at the agora. Today, citizens know government as red tape, long lines, and cold, distant bureaucracies. The reins of government have slipped from "we the people" to inaccessible government officials.

Fresh from giving a GOSCON keynote where such ideas are the mother's milk of 'movement software,' Kundra continues:

The District of Columbia, however, is at the forefront of a new era of governance, one in which technological advances now allow people from around the world unfettered access to their government. Through these advances, constituents can hold their government accountable from the privacy of their own homes. The District of Columbia is bringing people closer to government through collaborative technologies like wikis, data feeds, videos and dashboards. We're throwing open DC's warehouse of public data so that everyone--constituents, policymakers, and businesses--can meet in a new digital public square.

The early results are intriguing - 8 people have submitted initial apps, the first one went live within 2 days of the contest opening, and more than 90 people have signed up for the party when this experiment at the intersection of democracy and technology is over.

There are private sponsors of the effort, which may make incumbent technology companies nervous, or angry, or both.  And that list of incumbents may include Google, which is probably not the way it thinks of itself.  But time catches up with former young Turks everytime.

It promises make good watching.  And it could be a proving ground for what Web 2.0 might actually look like in real life. Game on!