White House Fact Sheet: “Today, the Administration is celebrating the five-year anniversary of Challenge.gov, a historic effort by the Federal Government to collaborate with members of the public through incentive prizes to address our most pressing local, national, and global challenges. True to the spirit of the President’s charge from his first day in office, Federal agencies have collaborated with more than 200,000 citizen solvers—entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, students, and more—in more than 440 challenges, on topics ranging from accelerating the deployment of solar energy, to combating breast cancer, to increasing resilience after Hurricane Sandy.
Highlighting continued momentum from the President’s call to harness the ingenuity of the American people, the Administration is announcing:
- Nine new challenges from Federal agencies, ranging from commercializing NASA technology, to helping students navigate their education and career options, to protecting marine habitats.
- Expanding support for use of challenges and prizes, including new mentoring support from the General Services Administration (GSA) for interested agencies and a new $244 million innovation platform opened by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with over 70 partners.
In addition, multiple non-governmental institutions are announcing 14 new challenges, ranging from improving cancer screenings, to developing better technologies to detect, remove, and recover excess nitrogen and phosphorus from water, to increasing the resilience of island communities….
Expanding the Capability for Prize Designers to find one another
The GovLab and MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance will launch an expert network for prizes and challenges. The Governance Lab (GovLab) and MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance will develop and launch the Network of Innovators (NoI) expert networking platform. NoI will make easily searchable the know-how of innovators on topics ranging from developing prize-backed challenges, opening up data, and use of crowdsourcing for public good. Platform users will answer questions about their skills and experiences, creating a profile that enables them to be matched to those with complementary knowledge to enable mutual support and learning. A beta version for user testing within the Federal prize community will launch in early October, with a full launch at the end of October. NoI will be open to civil servants around the world…(More)”