Open Gov’s Prize-Palooza or How We All Became Marketing Creatives for The White House

You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. Then they get to be men they forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: I'm free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't, I can, and my children will. Boys ought to grow up remembering that.(Source: IMDB)



In Jefferson Smith’s impassioned speech, Jimmy Stewart made our eyes tear and put a little choke in our throats. (No? Well, maybe you’re related to the secretly crooked senator in the movie. No spoilers here.)

With "Mr Smith Goes to Washington", Frank Capra provided one of the most compelling creative pieces for citizens to care about our nation, our freedoms - reinstilling belief that an ordinary citizen of good intent can triumph over a lumbering government system when its diverted off it true course.

Now, even more so in this 1939 movie, our government is saddled with huge geological layers of administratrion, immense rule books and daunting only-an-attourney- can- decipher" procedures that seem to defy a person to participate.

From climate change, financial reform to the  U.S. education system, the issues on the table are pressing and  will affect our own and our children's lives:  And yet even as bills are processed through a furious  congressional workload,  with an average 8000 regulations issued per year, an August 2009 Harris Poll indicated  many Americans are apathetic and few are familiar with their leaders in Congress. A recent March 2010 survey  by the Pew Research Center  of People and the Press concludes that " By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days."

There's an immense chasm to bridge. As in Capra's movie, the current administration inherits a legacy, centralized monolithic system which insulates lawmakers from populist views.

But President  Obama isn't taking that.  Like Jefferson Smith, he  passionately wants to change things. And so it was, as one of his first acts in the White House, he launched the Open Government Initiative, an agenda built on three core principles: Transparency, Participation and Collaboration. One of his core actions has been in directing the release of data by the federal agencies.

How to create more transparency, foster participation and engagement? How to create what Beth Noveck, U.S. Deputy Chief Technology and Director of the Open Government Initiative , has described as  "DoSomething.gov?"

Luckily, it seems all the elements are coalescing toward what Tim O'Reilly has called "Government as a Platform". And though his concept is still evolving, he's struck a resounding chord in describing how the government might deploy the same powerful forces we've seen work in private industry with Web 2.0

In a nutshell: the secret to the success of bellwethers like Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter is that each of these sites, in its own way, has learned to harness the power of its users to add value to—no, more than that, to co-create—its offerings.

 The key phrase here is 'harness the power of its users to add value - to co-create its offerings'.

As the old Chambers Brother's hit sang ♫ Time has Come Today. (Feel free to play that  while you read on...;-))

Crowdsourcing + Web 2.0   ☛ Government as Platform

Four forces are converging to enable the government to move  "one data server at a time" to greater transparency and citizen participation:

1. Web 2.0 along with profound cultural changes inspired by social media technologies 

have deeply and irrevocably changed people expectations of how they want to interact. Crowdsourcing experiments like NetFlix $1 Mn challenge and DARPA's Red Balloon contest have made us aware that we can solve the most complex problems through collaboration.

2. The Change Agent Role of Prize Economics is Better Understood.

As I described in earlier post, the marketing appeal and, more importantly, efficiencies of incentive-based challenges have stirred both the public and private sector's imaginations.

3. The Wide Availability of Data Mining and Interactive Visualization Tools

many of which are free, in the hands of net citizens allow the unleashing of talent. The most beauteous of these tools combine "graphical positive reinforcement" meaning pleasing visuals with   "progressive insight": As the user clicks through the different data views, they gain more insight into the data.

4. The Formation of an Open Innovation community Crossing the Public and Private Chasm to Drive Change.

Within the public sector, key thought leaders like Aneesh Chopra, first Federal Chief Technology Officer of the U.S., Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, Beth Noveck and others  are leading by example.  And the meeting of like minds within the private sector is clear: Listening to Noveck describe "DoSomething.gov" really evokes  O'Reilly's "Government as a Platform".

The shared idea is that government provides infrastructure , open data sets (eg. Data.gov) and base operating rules (eg. contests) which the private community can then take a step further, building practical applications upon those data sets.

One of the best examples of the meeting of government open-ness with private application development is given by Tim O'Reilly: The City of Wasington D.C's App Store showcases not just raw data sets but applications built by private citizens and companies, such as ParkitDC and FixMyCity DC, allowing identification and reporting of street repairs needed.

Following President Obama's Open Government Initiate, an April OMB directive moved on to encourage federal agencies to use prize contests and challenges to enlist the talents of the public.

Now that's where you and I come in.

Our Marketing Assignment for Stirring Change

In essence, we, the tax-paying-non-Beltway net citizens can be part of the new marketing department for Open Gov. Whether you are an software engineer, data visualization expert, storyboard maker in an ad agency, or university team, here are some of the  changes the federal government wants us to participate in:

Change 1: Motivate our Kids to Eat Better and Engage in Physical Activity.

Big Concept: Conquer childhood obesity, by designing creative, fun, interactive tools using the USDA nutritional database. As of today, some 13,000+  adults and kids have entered this context.

Prize Dollar Value: $60,000 total; Two Grand Prizes of $10,000 each

Contest Website:  Michelle Obama's App's for Healthy Kids Challenge

Change 2: Create a Video Explaining Federal Rulemaking & Regulations so Even Your Kid Sister can Understand it.

Big concept: Oh, rulemaking. Now that sounds ghastly dry, no? Well, as the video above points out, most  of us know and loved the Cash-for-Clunkers program. But did you realise that was the outcome of a rule-making directive and you could have had input into that program? More motivated now?

Prize Dollar Value: $2500

Contest Website: Rulemaking Matters: The EPA's Video Contest

Change 3: Craft a Visualization Illuminating how the Congressional Floor Proceedings Work.

Actually in Capra's movie, Jefferson Smith used knowledge of floor proceedings to his advantage. You can too - or at least help other Americans do it.

Prize Dollar Value: Top Prize $5000

Contest Website: Best entry point is within The Design for America project pages.

Change 4. Tell an Engaging Story Describing how a Bill Becomes a Law.

(The flow diagram below is useful. But you can do better than the below, right?)

Prize Dollar Value: Top Prize $5000

Contest Website: Check out Sunlight Lab's The Design for America project page.

There are in fact many more contests you can participate in as you can see by visiting Sunlight Labs, one of the thought leaders in transparency in government.

Useful Data Mining and Visualization Design Tools

Many of these contests have everything to do with taking large government data sets and opening our eyes to rich trends and patterns to help better access, understand the data and make better decisions. Data Viz experts speak of a "magical moment" in which "an unwieldy data set is transformed into an image on a screen, suddenly giving user/viewers the perception of an unexpected pattern."

By making data more approachable, for instance, graphing changes over time or by geography, numbers come to life, telling us perhaps where the next jobs will be, how the Federal Stimulus money is being spent even showing  what sectors  of the economy will likely be first affected with the recovery. Understanding the procedural flow embedded in a government process like rulemaking against a timeline tells us when we as citizens have the opportunity to have impact. 

Many wonderful tools exist to assist in these challenges and here I'll just highlight just a few:

click to interactIBM's Many Eyes

Developed by IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group, Many Eyes consists of a set of visualization tools set within a social-sharing platform. The philosphy behind Many Eyes (also influenced by Many Brains outside IBM) is that visualizations "gains power when multiple people use [them] to communicate and explore information together".

(Admittedly, I didn't spend as much time with this one as with some of the others. Please explore yourself!)

Click to interactPrezi

It may seems strange to include a "zooming presentation" editor and creation tool here.  But there's many a reason Harvard Business Review gave it the Steve Jobsian "Insanely Great!" cheer.  Breaking the Powerpoint frozen-logic death march, Prezi encourages nonlinear thinking: its group, layering and zooming capabilities with multimedia objects allow a presenter amazing flexibility in showing the relationships of their ideas.  Check out this great example from Allison Blank to get just an inkling of its compelling power to attract attention and "think deeper". (Go on "Autoplay" or, better yet, discover it's capabilities by clicking around...). You don't need to be a data mining or visualization whiz to master this one.

click to interactTableau Public

Simply put, Tableau blew my mind when I interacted with its "dashboard" to understand the Unemployment Data shown to the left.  I'd never fully understood unemployment trends and was particularly interested in - well- our current time slot.

Tableau Public's website says there's no language to learn, no flash, no plug-ins, no API. With the ability to create interactive graphics, dashboards, maps and tables from any data set, this tool too looks "Insanely Great".

Trendalyzer aka Google Motion Charts

Created by the internationally reknown health statistician, Hans Rosling (and family ), Trendanalyzer was purchased by Google and now is available as Google Motion Charts.

While I did not play with this tool, the video demo by Hans Rosling to the U.S. State Department (included below) is widely regarded as one of the most profound demonstrations of, as Prof. Rosling puts it so well, "My Data Set can Change your Mind Set".

In the end, changing belief and behavior with data is what Open Gov and science share in common. (Bear in mind- this tool does require, among other skills, competence with Flash.)

 Do we have this now?  This is an Awesome Hey Day for Technical Marketing folks and their Engineering BFFs.

Still Need Inspiration?

Actually, you don't need to be a data visualization expert or a technical marketeer to contribute your talents to serve Open Gov's goals.   A great example of that  is  the recent winner of the GSA's $2500 prize for a video describing the most useful features of the USA.gov website.

In this video, Peter Sullivan of Nashville, Tenn. gathered friends and family into his homegrown video, to show how he could find his congressional representative, search out tax information, even find student loan information on USA.gov.  Great stuff!

Too corney for you?

This fabulous 3 minute animated infographic of the Red Riding Hood story suggests how the congressional proceedings challenge might be won:

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Not deep enough for you?

The mother of all animated infographic visualizations, speaking also to the very heart of the Open Gov challenges, is shown in this TED talk by Hans Rosling, an international health professor at The Karolinska Institute in Sweden and inventor of the Trendalyzer tool. His talk and visual demo not only shows the power of data visualization in busting our myths about the developing world - but much of the data is drawn from U.S. open government data sets.

In the end, whether you want to use Capra-esque video drama, a roiling home-grown video like Peter Sullivan's, a sweet animated infographic like Tomas Nilsson's or use your prowess in visual data visualization -- you can help tell our government's hidden stories, unveil the data, enabling a larger group of people to realise the wealth of resources we have.

It's not new to say: A picture is worth one thousand words. What is relatively new is that an interactive, animated  picture may be worth one million numbers. And when those one million numbers come from a previously hidden societal data set -- that can change mind sets. 

Source:The Imaginary Foundation | PSFK

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Related Reading:

Five Ways Government Works Better with Social Media- Mashable

The Personal Democracy Forum's techPresident

Obama Has Gove Contest Crazy - AlterNet