A Snapshot of Recent Additions to the GovLab Wiki

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance, the GovLab Wiki provides a collaborative repository of information and research at the nexus of technology, governance and citizenship. Every two weeks, The GovLab Blog will publish a snapshot of recent additions posted to the wiki. The following is a summary and collection of key findings from recent entries posted by GovLab Research and two student teams taking part in the GovLab Capstone at NYU Wagner.
WE NEED YOU: Please help us advance the field’s knowledge base by improving what we have and  sharing your insights and research on the GovLab Wiki.

Highlights

Our latest updates to the Wiki have focused on concepts and case-studies related to the ways institutions can become smarter and innovative by:

• Leveraging the public’s expertise through Prize-backed Challenges with a focus on the paradigmatic NYC BigApps Challenge example.
• Learning from open innovation efforts in the private sector. Three organizations recently examined – GroupTalent, InnoCentive and TopCoder – provide a financial incentive for participation. In addition, all rely on the crowd for the development and fulfillment of new products and services.
• Using diverse but related platforms and techniques for strategically identifying who knows what. Case studies of Expert Rank, New York University’s Operations Skills & Talents Database and PatientsLikeMe led to three initial conclusions:
  • Expertise often must be validated by some external mechanism or internal force;
  • A system for identifying and tapping expertise is often only as effective as its users’ input; and
  • To work well, platforms tend to require wide-spread use within their arena of influence.

In addition we also explored the concept of Open Contracting, and the development of tools and innovations within the movement, such as RFP-EZ. Work in this area is helping to produce better results for governments and reduce redundancy within agencies.

Key Findings

Prize-Backed Challenges – a crowdsourcing and open innovation technique that generally relies on monetary prizes to inspire wide participation to help solve particular problems.

• Key Finding: Prize-backed challenges offer many advantages for government—including paying only for results, establishing an ambitious goal without having to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed, bringing out-of-discipline perspectives to bear, and stimulating private sector investment that is often much greater than the prize value.

NYC Big Apps – a New York City open data and open innovation competition.

• Key Findings:
  • The competition has inspired the creation of nearly 240 applications, engaged more than 275,000 unique visitors to the website leading to more than 83,000 people voting on specific apps.
  • More than 60 City agencies, commissions and Business Improvement Districts have made more than 350 new data sets available for NYC BigApps 2013, bringing the total number of raw data sets that will be available to developers to more than 1,000.

GroupTalent – a hiring platform that lists contract-for-hire opportunities so a developer can try out working with a company before they commit to a longer-term job.

• Key Finding: As of August 2013, GroupTalent had over 6,000 developers and 200 companies participating in its recruiting platform. On average, developers receive $3,000 to $7,000 a week per project.

Innocentive – an open innovation company that solves research and development problems by creating and connecting a global network of problem solvers, and giving cash awards to those who provide the best solutions.

• Key Finding: More than 1,650 external challenges have been posted, receiving over 40,000 solution submissions, and awards have been distributed to over 1,500 individuals for a total value of $40+ million.

TopCoder – a digital open innovation platform that provides companies and enterprises with access to global talent instantly to develop innovative software applications within a distributive innovation system.

• Key Finding: With $6,000 in total prize money, 122 TopCoder members submitted working algorithms to ultimately provide Harvard Medical School with a program solution for its Biomedics Big Data Open Innovation Challenge.

Expert Rank – a newly developed expert-finding technique for online forums that uses an algorithm to evaluate the expertise of users within a specific knowledge community, based on both authored documents and social status within the community.

• Key Finding: When tested in Microsoft Office discussion groups, 5 of the top 10 experts recommended by Expert Rank corresponded with those acknowledged by community members and Microsoft personnel to be experts.

New York University Operations Skills & Talents Database – a searchable employee database providing members of the NYU Operations unit information on the skills of their coworkers to help aid collaboration.

• Key Finding: The platform – which has been in place place for over five years, predating many similar efforts – connects over 300 employees in the NYU Operations unit, from human resources professionals to crisis management experts.

PatientsLikeMe – an online platform where patients share their health stories and data, creating a community where all users learn from the experiences of others with similar conditions.

• Key Finding: Consistent with its goal of altering the course of healthcare provision across the globe, a small survey of PatientsLikeMe users revealed that the site has made it easier for a majority of those surveyed to both communicate with their healthcare team and make decisions about their treatment.

Open Contracting – a movement referring to the norms and practices for increased disclosure and participation in public contracting.

• Key Findings:
  • The recently developed Open Contracting Partnerships Global Principles cover various aspects of affirmative disclosure, participation, monitoring, and oversight, with the aim of making contracting more competitive and fair, improving contract performance, and securing development outcomes.
  • These Global Principles incentivized the World Bank to make a commitment in 2013 to ensure that their contracts are public.

RFP-EZ – a federal experiment in procurement innovation that helps companies learn about and compete for government contracts.

• Key Findings:
  • RFP-EZ allows small technology companies to gain easier access to the Federal Government’s nearly $77 billion information technology supply chain, providing a potentially critical revenue stream as they build their operations.
  • On a per-project basis, bids received through the beta version of RFP-EZ (launched in December 2013) were consistently lower than those received through FedBizOpps — over 30% lower on average.

The GovLab Capstone Expertise Team includes: Andrea Arce, Colin Bottles, Lauren Bush and Danielle Emery
The GovLab Capstone Crowdsourcing Team includes: Naomi Adland, Naomi Berlin, Dinorah Cantu Pedraza, Marisse Crenier Del Olmo, Hallie Martin and Chandan Sharma