An X Prize for government - on a budget

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!