Networked Publics

July 2010
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And the winner is...

 

Civic Apps competitions are all the rage. Enabled by governments making data sets available to the public (and to the tech communty in particular), the idea is simple: bring data together with people who know how to make it useful, invite them make something great, and reward them in public. Washington, DC was first out of the gate in 2008, with Apps for Democracy, the brainchild of Peter Corbett (iStrategyLabs) and Vivek Kundra  (then the District's Chief Technology Officer, now our nation's first Chief Information Officer).

 

Many cities and communities have since embraced similar efforts: New York, San Francisco, and Seattle among them.

 

This week, in conjunction with OSCON (O'Reilly Open-Source Convention and a programmers' paradise), Portland, Oregon honored its own Civic Apps competition award winners – Sara Sharp, Robb Shecter, John McBride, Andy Wallace, Edwin Knuth, Max Ogden, and Gary Kee.

 

Portland Mayor Sam Adams emceed the event. Dozens of tech denizens were in attendance, along with venerable OSCON host, Tim O'Reilly.

 

What the Civic Apps Movement is Really About

 

It's irresistably exciting – the idea that government could make data available to enable new intelligence, create new services, even spur new businesses that meet the real needs of citizens and residents. But there's also something more profound going on here: we are redefining what it means to govern.

 

Tim O'Reilly hints at this idea in the video below ("open source is not about what we thought is was about"), and Andy Wallace reinforces it.

 

 

 

Andy built PDXBus because he wanted to use it (apparently, so did a lot of other people, myself included). Before open source (the behavioral code, not the actual code), Andy might have shared the idea with TriMet and a few friends, but it may not have made TriMet's list of top priorities. And then, who knows?

 

Instead, TriMet made data available that Andy could use to build an application that we could all download onto our phones and never have to stand wondering what to do at a bus stop again.

 

This is one (tiny) example of a broader and ongoing renegotiation of roles between governments, residents and citizens, and businesses happening all around us.

 

Cities and communities that experiment with data and information sharing, engage residents in problem-solving, make it easy for diverse people to connect with one another and their government(s), and allow the lessons of small collaborative ventures to influence the larger structures of governing and managing at a mass scale are laying the foundation for gov – and community – 2.0.

 

And the winner?

 

It's us.

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Innovation and Transformation

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think-tank based in Washington, DC, hosted From Small Innovations to Social Transformation, a panel discussion on public sector innovation in support of the Center's Doing What Works project. Accompanied by the release of two new reports, "Capital Ideas: How to Generate Ideas in the Public Sector" and "Scaling "New Heights: How to Spot Small Successes in the Public Sector and Make Them Big", the event featured the reports' authors Jitinder Kohli (CAP) and Geoff Mulgan (The Young Foundation, UK), as well as panelists Willam  Eggers (Deloitte), Judith Rodin, (Rockefeller Foundation), and James Shelton (US Department of Education).

New Social Compact For Innovation

Public sector innovation matters. It's not about about government adopting new set of best practices, but about fundamentally renegotiating the roles of government, business, philanthropy, and civil society – transforming how we govern ourselves, share the commons, and construct a sustainable foundation for future generations across the globe.

 

The panel offered a torrent of highlights:

 

  • The unapologetic assertion that government has a role to play in innovation, that progressives should quick to embrace it. (G. Mulgan) 
    • The US government did play an important role in the creation of the American (private-sector) innovation system, which was been the envy of the world for many decades.
    • Key industries poised for growth in the coming years include those in which government plays a key role – health and social care, education, and energy and infrastructure, for example.
    • The demand for public services so far exceeds the resources available to provide them (and increasingly so – see California's current budget woes) that incremental productivity improvements or marginal budget-cutting will be enitrely inadequate.

 

  • The case that problems are too complex and interdependent – and the stakes are too high – for the old model of philanthropy-as-social-venture-captial and government-as-scaler-and-funder-of-programs to be effective over time. (J. Rodin)
    • We need a more systems-based approach where every sector (business, government, philanthropic and non-profit, and citizen) innovates where it can, intentionally connecting, sharing, and leveraging assets and insights on an ongoing basis.
    • We need not just product-based innovation aimed at the solutions to a particular problem but also process innovation that will help all sectors find better solutions to all kinds of problems (and build an evidence base) over time.
    • We can also take advantage of our vastly increased connectivity to emphasize recombinant strategies - taking existing innovations and mashing them up in new ways to create new value out of them in business, government, or communities across the globe.

Resources for Change

The reports themselves are easily accessible, genuinely informative, and directed at those in and outside of government.

 

Go ahead. Watch and read for yourself – and share with every innovator, innovation champion, and change agent you know.

 

 

[Full disclosure: I worked with Geoff Mulgan in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit in 2001 and have followed his work (and adventures since). I am an unabashed and unapologetic fan, but I would (and do) champion good ideas wherever they come from.]

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