Yesterday, California’s Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool, IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California’s IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 23 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives.
IdeaScale’s technology allows citizens to submit ideas to a site and then vote on their favorite ideas via a Digg-like voting system. The ideas that have the most favorable votes bubble to the top. Agencies can also participate in the discussion by commenting on ideas and posting updates, effectively creating a community around this ideation.
For example, the U.S. Department of State is using IdeaScale to crowdsource ideas and suggestions on policy. The Obama administration also used IdeaScale to solicit ideas from government agencies on its Open Government initiative last year. Of course, IdeaScale’s tool can be used for non-government initiatives as well. According to its website, the platform has been used by Microsoft, RedHat, Navteq and others.
President Obama’s government has been a fan of crowdsourcing, and has used similar tool Google Moderator to power citizen participation on Change.gov, and Town Hall meetings.
I actually looked this up. If anybody else is interested in selling or writing proposals to the state, you can start here:
http://www.pd.dgs.ca.gov/sell2state/default.htm
In Manor, Texas (pop. 6,500) we chose to use Spigit (http://www.spigit.com) because they offered a truely sustainable idea collection platform that ranks and rewards members for their participation in the innovation process (using game mechanics). It’s a completely structured and transparent process that has already been responsible for 5 implemented solutions since the November (2009). You can watch a video on the innovation process here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJP9skeobCU. Feel free to check out the platform and sign-up for an account at http://www.manorlabs.org.
It’s worth mentioning UserVoice (http://uservoice.com/) who offer a similar product and is also used by local governments (e.g. http://www.ideasforseattle.org, http://www.ideasforaustin.com)
Also interesting is http://www.myidea4ca.com which has the same motivation but is built on top of Twitter.
as long as you can submit in a blind manner, you’re going to get a good deal of junk suggestions..
if the system forced you to submit a bit of background information on what thee submitter’s background is, as well as the user’s real id, the system would start to have some meaning…
take a look at the crap that’s been posted to the CA idea site…
peace..
Although I note the reference in one of the comments above to “implemented solutions”, this looks to be yet another attempt to gather bright ideas, almost all of which will probably go nowhere.
The experience of innovation competitions over the last few years should tell us that a shortage of ideas isn’t the problem. Following them through, is.
For an alternative take on innovation for government, have a look at the proposal I’ve set out here – “Hardwired State”.
http://paulclarke.com/honestlyreal/2010/01/hardwired-state/
Look at Washington DC. From the Whitehouse to Capitol Hill I see 537 mistakes of crowd sourcing. Is our election system not crowd sourcing? Look at what a mess that has created. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!!
Crowdsourcing is becoming more sophisticated and specialist niches are developing.
Major advertisers like Unilever and Frito-Lay have turned to crowdsourcing for their ad ideas.
Ad agencies, fundamentally in the ideas business, are panicking because most of them don’t get social media or search and can’t see that crowdsourcing could improve their business model and the quality of their work.
http://theinnovizer.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/how-ad-agencies-could-learn-to-stop-worrying-and-love-crowdsourcing/