Index: Prizes and Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on prizes and challenges and was originally published in 2015.

This index highlights recent findings about two key techniques in shifting innovation from institutions to the general public:

  • Prize-Induced Contests – using monetary rewards to incentivize individuals and other entities to develop solutions to public problems; and
  • Grand Challenges – posing large, audacious goals to the public to spur collaborative, non-governmental efforts to solve them.

You can read more about Governing through Prizes and Challenges here. You can also watch Alph Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive, answer the GovLab’s questions about challenge authoring and defining the problem here.

Previous installments of the Index include Measuring Impact with Evidence, The Data Universe, Participation and Civic Engagement and Trust in Institutions. Please share any additional statistics and research findings on the intersection of technology in governance with us by emailing shruti at thegovlab.org.

Prize-Induced Contests

  • Year the British Government introduced the Longitude Prize, one of the first instances of prizes by government to spur innovation: 1714
  • President Obama calls on “all agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges” in his Strategy for American Innovation: September 2009
  • The US Office of Management and Budget issues “a policy framework to guide agencies in using prizes to mobilize American ingenuity and advance their respective core missions”:  March 2010
  • Launch of Challenge.gov, “a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find public-sector prize competitions”: September 2010
    • Number of competitions currently live on Challenge.gov in February 2015: 22 of 399 total
    • How many competitions on Challenge.gov are for $1 million or above: 23
  • The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act is introduced, which grants “all Federal agencies authority to conduct prize competitions to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core missions”: 2010
  • Value of prizes authorized by COMPETES: prizes up to $50 million
  • Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions memorandum issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget to aid agencies to take advantage of authorities in COMPETES: August 2011
  • Number of prize competitions run by the Federal government from 2010 to April 2012: 150
  • How many Federal agencies have run prize competitions by 2012: 40
  • Prior to 1991, the percentage of prize money that recognized prior achievements according to an analysis by McKinsey and Company: 97%
    • Since 1991, percentage of new prize money that “has been dedicated to inducement-style prizes that focus on achieving a specific, future goal”: 78%
  • Value of the prize sector as estimated by McKinsey in 2009: $1-2 billion
  • Growth rate of the total value of new prizes: 18% annually
  • Growth rate in charitable giving in the US: 2.5% annually
  • Value of the first Horizon Prize awarded in 2014 by the European Commission to German biopharmaceutical company CureVac GmbH “for progress towards a novel technology to bring life-saving vaccines to people across the planet in safe and affordable ways”: €2 million
  • Number of solvers registered on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing company: 355,000+ from nearly 200 countries
    • Total Challenges Posted: 2,000+ External Challenges
    • Total Solution Submissions: 40,000+
    • Value of the awards: $5,000 to $1+ million
    • Success Rate for premium challenges: 85%

Grand Challenges

  • Value of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, sponsored in part by DOE to develop production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: $10 million
    • Number of teams around the world who took part in the challenge “to develop a new generation of technologies” for production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: 111 teams
  • Time it took for the Air Force Research Laboratory to receive a workable solution on “a problem that had vexed military security forces and civilian police for years” by opening the challenge to the world: 60 days
  • Value of the HHS Investing in Innovation initiative to spur innovation in Health IT, launched under the new COMPETES act: $5 million program
  • Number of responses received by NASA for its Asteroid Grand Challenge RFI which seeks to identify and address all asteroid threats to the human population: over 400
  • The decreased cost of sequencing a single human genome as a result of the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge: $7000 from $100 million
  • Amount the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge has contributed to the US economy for every $1 invested by the US federal government: $141 for every $1 invested
  • The amount of funding for research available for the “Brain Initiative,” a collaboration between the National Institute of Health, DARPA and the National Science Foundation, which seeks to uncover new prevention and treatment methods for brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, autism and schizophrenia: $100 million
  • Total amount offered in cash awards by the Department of Energy’s “SunShot Grand Challenge,” which seeks to eliminate the cost disparity between solar energy and coal by the end of the decade: $10 million

Sources

Civic Media Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Site and Book edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis: “Civic life is comprised of the attention and actions an individual devotes to a common good. Participating in a human rights rally, creating and sharing a video online about unfair labor practices, connecting with neighbors after a natural disaster: these are all civic actions wherein the actor seeks to benefit a perceived common good. But where and how civic life takes place, is an open question. The lines between the private and the public, the self-interested and the civic are blurring as digital cultures transform means and patterns of communication around the world.

As the definition of civic life is in flux, there is urgency in defining and questioning the mediated practices that compose it. Civic media are the mediated practices of designing, building, implementing or using digital tools to intervene in or participate in civic life. The Civic Media Project (CMP) is a collection of short case studies from scholars and practitioners from all over the world that range from the descriptive to the analytical, from the single tool to the national program, from the enthusiastic to the critical. What binds them together is not a particular technology or domain (i.e. government or social movements), but rather the intentionality of achieving a common good. Each of the case studies collected in this project reflects the practices associated with the intentional effort of one or many individuals to benefit or disrupt a community or institution outside of one’s intimate and professional spheres.

As the examples of civic media continue to grow every day, the Civic Media Project is intended as a living resource. New cases will be added on a regular basis after they have gone through an editorial process. Most importantly, the CMP is meant to be a place for conversation and debate about what counts as civic, what makes a citizen, what practices are novel, and what are the political, social and cultural implications of the integration of technology into civic lives.

How to Use the Site

Case studies are divided into four sections: Play + Creativity, Systems + Design, Learning + Engagement, and Community + Action. Each section contains about 25 case studies that address the themes of the section. But there is considerable crossover and thematic overlap between sections as well. For those adventurous readers, the Tag Cloud provides a more granular entry point to the material and a more diverse set of connections.

We have also developed a curriculum that provides some suggestions for educators interested in using the Civic Media Project and other resources to explore the conceptual and practical implications of civic media examples.

One of the most valuable elements of this project is the dialogue about the case studies. We have asked all of the project’s contributors to write in-depth reviews of others’ contributions, and we also invite all readers to comment on cases and reviews. Do not be intimidated by the long “featured comments” in the Disqus section—these formal reviews should be understood as part of the critical commentary that makes each of these cases come alive through discussion and debate.

The Book

Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is forthcoming from MIT Press and will serve as the print book companion to the Civic Media Project. The book identifies the emerging field of Civic Media by brining together leading scholars and practitioners from a diversity of disciplines to shape theory, identify problems and articulate opportunities.  The book includes 19 chapters (and 25 case studies) from fields as diverse as philosophy, communications, education, sociology, media studies, art, policy and philanthropy, and attempts to find common language and common purpose through the investigation of civic media….(More)”

How Open Is University Data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro  at GovTech: “Many states now support open data, or data that’s made freely available without restriction in a nonproprietary, machine-readable format, to increase government transparency, improve public accountability and participation, and unlock opportunities for civic innovation. To date, 10 states have adopted open data policies, via executive order or legislation, and 24 states have built open data portals. But while many agencies have joined the open data movement, state colleges and universities have largely ignored this opportunity. To remedy this, policymakers should consider how to extend open data policies to state colleges and universities.

There are many potential benefits of open data for higher education. First, it can help prospective students and their parents better understand the value of different degree programs. One way to control rising higher ed costs is to create more informed consumers. The feds are already pushing for such changes. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for schools to make more information publicly available about the costs of obtaining a college degree, and the White House launched the College Scorecard, an online tool to compare data about the average tuition cost, size of loan payments and loan default rate for different schools.

But students deserve more detailed information. Prospective students should be able to decide where to attend and what to study based on historical data like program costs, percentage of students completing the program and how long they take to do so, and what kind of earning power they have after graduating.

Second, open data can aid better fiscal oversight and accountability of university operations. In 2014, states provided about $76 billion in support for higher ed, yet few colleges and universities have adopted open data policies to increase the transparency of their budgets. Contrast this with California cities like Oakland, Palo Alto and Los Angeles, which created online tools to let others explore and visualize their budgets. Additional oversight, including from the public, could help reduce fraud, waste and abuse in higher education, save taxpayers money and create more opportunities for public participation in state budgeting.

Third, open data can be a valuable resource for producing innovations that make universities a better place to work and study. Large campuses are basically small cities, and many cities have found open data useful for improving public safety and optimizing transportation services. Universities hold much untapped data: course catalogs, syllabi, bus schedules, campus menus, campus directories, faculty evaluations, etc. Creating portals to release these data sets and building application programming interfaces to access this information would give developers direct access to data that students, faculty, alumni and other stakeholders could use to build apps and services to improve the college experience….(More)”

Amid Open Data Push, Agencies Feel Urge for Analytics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jack Moore at NextGov: “Federal agencies, thanks to their unique missions, have long been collectors of valuable, vital and, no doubt, arcane data. Under a nearly two-year-old executive order from President Barack Obama, agencies are releasing more of this data in machine-readable formats to the public and entrepreneurs than ever before.
But agencies still need a little help parsing through this data for their own purposes. They are turning to industry, academia and outside researchers for cutting-edge analytics tools to parse through their data to derive insights and to use those insights to drive decision-making.
Take the U.S. Agency for International Development, for example. The agency administers U.S. foreign aid programs aimed at ending extreme poverty and helping support democratic societies around the globe.
Under the agency’s own recent open data policy, it’s started collecting reams of data from its overseas missions. Starting Oct. 1, organizations doing development work on the ground – including through grants and contracts – have been directed to also collect data generated by their work and submit it to back to agency headquarters. Teams go through the data, scrub it to remove sensitive material and then publish it.
The data spans the gamut from information on land ownership in South Sudan to livestock demographics in Senegal and HIV prevention activities in Zambia….The agency took the first step in solving that problem with a Jan. 20 request for information from outside groups for cutting-edge data analytics tools.
“Operating units within USAID are sometimes constrained by existing capacity to transform data into insights that could inform development programming,” the RFI stated.
The RFI queries industry on their capabilities in data mining and social media analytics and forecasting and systems modeling.
USAID is far from alone in its quest for data-driven decision-making.
A Jan. 26 RFI from the Transportation Department’s Federal Highway Administration also seeks innovative ideas from industry for “advanced analytical capabilities.”…(More)”

Citizen Science: Catch, Click and Submit Contest

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wilson Commons Lab: “The inaugural Catch, Click and Submit Contest begins on Feb 21st in honor of the National Invasive Species Awareness Week running Feb 22nd through the 28th. The contest, which calls on anglers to photograph and report non-native fish species caught during the derby, will award prizes to various categories such as “Most Unusual Catch” and “Most Species”.  Submissions from the contest will aid researchers in developing a better understanding of the distribution of fish species throughout Florida waterways.
By engaging the existing angler community, the contest hopes to increase public awareness of the potential impacts that arise from non-native fish species. “The Catch, Click and Submit Contest offers anglers the opportunity to assist natural resource managers in finding nonnative species by doing what they enjoy – fishing!” said biologist Kelly Gestring. “The early detection of a new, nonnative species could provide a better opportunity to control or even eradicate a population.” The hope is that participants will choose to target non-native fish for consumption in the future, helping to control invasive populations…(More).”

Helping the Poor in Education: The Power of a Simple Nudge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Susan Dynarski in The New York Times: “There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States. A child born into a poor family has only a 9 percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children less prepared than their kindergarten classmates.

How can we close these gaps?….

Yet as these debates rage, researchers have been quietly finding small, effective ways to improve education. They have identified behavioral “nudges” that prod students and their families to take small steps that can make big differences in learning. These measures are cheap, so schools or nonprofits could use them immediately.

Let’s start with college. At every step of the way, low-income students are more likely to stumble on the path to higher education. Even the summer after high school is a perilous time, with 20 percent of those who plan to attend college not actually enrolling — a phenomenon known as “summer melt.” Bureaucratic barriers, like the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid, explain some of the drop-off.

While they were graduate students at Harvard, two young professors designed and tested a program to help students stick to their college plans. Benjamin L. Castleman, now at the University of Virginia, and Lindsay C. Page, at the University of Pittsburgh, set up a system of automatic, personalized text messages that reminded high school students about their college deadlines. The texts included links to required forms and live counselors.

The result? Students who received the texts were more likely to enroll in college: 70 percent, compared with 63 percent of those who did not get them. Seven percentage points is a big increase in this field, similar to the gains produced by scholarships that cost thousands of dollars. Yet this program cost only $7 per student.

The same researchers also tested a texting program to keep students from dropping out of college….(More)”

Donated Personal Data Could Aid Lifestyle Researchers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anya Skatova and James Goulding at Scientific American: “In the future it will be possible to donate our personal data to charitable causes. All sorts of data is recorded about us as we go about our daily lives—what we buy, where we go, who we call on the phone and our use of the internet. The time is approaching when we could liberate that data in support of good causes. Given many people already donate precious resources such as money or even blood for the benefit of society at large, this step might not be far away.
How could donated data help our society? Data is a rich source of people’s habits—shopping data from loyalty cards, for example, can reflect our diet. If people donate their personal data for research, analysis of it can provide scope to improve everything from understandings of the dietary pre-cursors to diabetes to the impact of lifestyle on heart disease.
But there are vital issues around the collection and use of personal data that must be addressed. Donation rests on trust: would people give their data away knowing that researchers will examine it, even if anonymously? Would they want others scrutinising their diet, or their shopping habits? Would people feel their privacy was being invaded, even if they had chosen to donate to help medical research?
Who would donate data to research?
Our recent research has found that around 60% of people are willing to donate their data for uses that will benefit the public. In some ways this is not surprising. As previous research demonstrated, people help others and take part in various pro-social activities. People voluntarily give to benefit society at large: they donate money to charities, or run marathons to raise money without knowing exactly who will benefit; they give blood, bone marrow, or even organs. They often do so out of concern for the welfare of others, or in other cases for more selfish reasons, such as enhancing their reputation, professional benefit, or just to feel good about themselves….
Donating data is certainly different from donating money or blood—there is very little obvious cost to us when donating our data. Unlike blood or money, data is something for which most of us have no use, nor has it any real monetary value to those of us that generate it, but it becomes valuable when combined with the data of others.
Currently companies leverage personal data to make money because it provides them with sophisticated understanding of consumer behaviour, from which they in turn can profit. But shouldn’t our data benefit us too?…(More)”

Local Governments and Nonprofits Test Crowdfunding for Civic Projects

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Drew Lindsay at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Fresh from municipal bankruptcy and locked in a court-mandated spending plan, Central Falls, R.I., controlled little of its budget. But officials found wiggle room in their fiscal straitjacket by borrowing a new idea from the world of philanthropy.
About a year ago, they launched a crowdfunding campaign similar to what’s found on Kickstarter, the online platform where artists, entrepreneurs, and others seek donations to bankroll creative projects. Using a Kickstarter-like website, the former mill town posted a proposal to beautify and clean up its landmark park. It promoted the project through videos, mass emails, and social and mainstream media—typical fundraising tools. Within weeks, it had raised $10,000 to buy new bins for trash and recycling in the park, designed by local artists as public art.
Central Falls is one of dozens of municipalities that has gone hat in hand online in recent years. They are part of a niche group of local governments, nonprofits, and community groups experimenting with “civic crowdfunding” campaigns to raise cash for programs and infrastructure designed for the common good.
The campaigns are typically small, aiming to raise from $5,000 to $30,000 and pay for things that might not even merit a line item in a municipal budget. In Philadelphia’s first successful crowdfunding campaign, for instance, it raised $2,163 for a youth garden program—this when the city spends about $4.5-billion a year.
The architects of civic crowdfunding campaigns are using the cash raised online to attract bigger dollars from state and federal sources. They’re also earning grants from private foundations that see robust crowdfunding as evidence of community backing for a project….
Several online platforms devoted to civic crowdfunding have launched in the United States in recent years, among them Citizinvestor, which worked with Central Falls and Philadelphia; ioby, a partner in the Denver bike-lane campaign; and Neighbor.ly, whose projects include neighborhood-based crowdfunding campaigns to expand a Kansas City, Mo., bike-sharing program.
Each typically takes a small commission from funds raised—usually 5 percent or less, plus a smaller percentage to cover credit-card transaction fees…. (More).

Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cem Dilmegani, Bengi Korkmaz, and Martin Lundqvist from McKinsey: “Citizens and businesses now expect government information to be readily available online, easy to find and understand, and at low or no cost. Governments have many reasons to meet these expectations by investing in a comprehensive public-sector digital transformation. Our analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of govern­ment digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Shared services, greater collaboration and inte­gra­tion, improved fraud management, and productivity enhancements enable system-wide efficiencies. At a time of increasing budgetary pressures, governments at national, regional, and local levels cannot afford to miss out on those savings.
Indeed, governments around the world are doing their best to meet citizen demand and capture benefits. More than 130 countries have online services. For example, Estonia’s 1.3 million residents can use electronic identification cards to vote, pay taxes, and access more than 160 services online, from unemployment benefits to property registration. Turkey’s Social Aid Infor­ma­tion System has consolidated multiple government data sources into one system to provide citizens with better access and faster decisions on its various aid programs. The United Kingdom’s gov.uk site serves as a one-stop information hub for all government departments. Such online services also provide greater access for rural populations, improve quality of life for those with physical infirmities, and offer options for those whose work and lifestyle demands don’t conform to typical daytime office hours.
However, despite all the progress made, most governments are far from capturing the full benefits of digitization. To do so, they need to take their digital transformations deeper, beyond the provision of online services through e-government portals, into the broader business of government itself. That means looking for opportunities to improve productivity, collabo­ration, scale, process efficiency, and innovation….
While digital transformation in the public sector is particularly challenging, a number of successful government initiatives show that by translating private-sector best practices into the public context it is possible to achieve broader and deeper public-sector digitization. Each of the six most important levers is best described by success stories….(More).”

Start-Up Seeks to Provide Inexpensive Satellite Images for Nonprofits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Wallace at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up, has ambitious plans to bring down the sky-high cost of satellite imagery and significantly increase the recording frequency of such photos—all with the goal of improving life down here on earth. To make that happen, the company plans to set up a nonprofit arm, Planet.org, to provide satellite images to charities and help them learn how to use the cutting-edge technology to fulfill their missions….
Satellite imagery is expensive, and the photos aren’t updated very often. The interval between image recordings can be from several weeks to more than a year. The satellites themselves are often the size of a school bus, may take as long as a decade to build, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Planet Labs is trying to upend that model. Rather than building custom parts, the company uses cutting-edge—but readily available—electronics and sensors to build shoebox-size microsatellites. The tiny devices have been launched from the International Space State and from unmanned rockets. Modeling its approach on the software industry, Planet Labs redesigns its satellites every three months or so, incorporating new information it learns by testing them in space.
The plan is to encircle the globe with a network of microsatellites that will scan the earth’s surface every day. So far, Planet Labs has launched 71 of the devices. It expects to launch 100 to 150 more satellites to meet a goal of achieving daily imaging in the next 12 to 18 months.
The prospect of cheaper, more up-to-date satellite imagery excites nonprofit technology experts.
Because of the cost, only a handful of large charities have been able to use satellite imagery in their work, says Jim Fruchterman, chief executive of Benetech, a nonprofit technology group in Palo Alto, Calif. He points to Amnesty International’s use of remote imagery to document human-rights abuses in Darfur and Syria as an example.
Lowering the price of the technology will increase the number of nonprofits that can use the data, and more-frequent images will expand the ways groups can use the information, he says. Human-rights groups could, in some cases, use the images to confirm or refute reports they receive, almost in real time, says Mr. Fruchterman….
Some of the ways that nonprofits will probably use the satellite data won’t be that different from applications by the company’s commercial customers, says Mr. Schingler.
One case in point, he says, is agriculture. Many farmers in developed countries already use satellite imagery to help them plan when they should plant and irrigate, says Mr. Schingler. With wider access to remote imagery, he says, nonprofits could help distribute the same information to farmers in developing countries….”