Starting on April 27th, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the OMB in partnership with the National Academy of Public Administration will run a national online dialogue to engage leading information technology (IT) vendors, thinkers, and consumers in answering the following question:
What ideas, tools, and approaches can make Recovery.gov a place where all citizens can transparently monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds?
For one week, participants from across the IT community will be able to recommend, discuss, and vote on the best ideas, tools, and approaches.
This approach has been used already by the Obama administration, although for less technical issues such as arranging questions for the President. Other jurisdictions have been doing similar things to ask constituents how to use recovery money (see my earlier post about Virginia, which is where the new CTO comes from).
Whereas the approach of engaging IT vendors and others in finding technical solutions is very attractive, it is less clear how a discussion about architectures and products cutting across a variety of areas (from web design to data management, from visualization to analytics) can be fruitfully conducted in such a short period of time.
Of course this is just an initial phase to gather input from a larger community, and the most promising ideas will be used as input for starting the actual design. In any case, it certainly needs to be orchestrated in such a way that allows new, simple ideas to pop up and not be obfuscated by the complexity of the overall architectural discussion.
Therefore it would be ideal to have a very high level strawman architecture that allows participants to focus on different elements and make idea comparison and voting more effective.
Another significant challenge will be how to turn whichever best idea will emerge into a system that can be procured rapidly enough. Since time is the essence, I wonder whether this will force the use of inexpensive consumer and open source tools as well as government technical staff to get a working prototype soon enough.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Let Data Free: Two Great Ideas for Recovery.gov // May 3, 2009 at 11:22 am
[...] indicated in a previous post, ideas about how to develop recovery.gov (the web site reporting about how the ARRA money is being [...]
2 What’s the Real Cost of Crowdsourcing? // Jun 4, 2009 at 5:02 pm
[...] I will explore this further in Gartner research, but let me pick one example: crowdsourcing, like what we have seen with AppsForDemocracy, AppsForAmerica or Recovery.gov. [...]
3 Regulations.gov Shows A Different Approach to Crowdsourcing // Jun 9, 2009 at 2:56 am
[...] previous attempts at crowdsourcing, like the one for Recovery.gov (see my earlier post), this one seems more focused on gathering comments on specific solutions rather then unstructured [...]
4 What’s the Real Cost of Crowdsourcing? « Innovation Crowdsourced // Jun 10, 2009 at 10:33 pm
[...] I will explore this further in Gartner research, but let me pick one example: crowdsourcing, like what we have seen with AppsForDemocracy, AppsForAmerica or Recovery.gov. [...]
5 What’s the Real Cost of Crowdsourcing? // Jun 16, 2009 at 9:01 pm
[...] I will explore this further in Gartner research, but let me pick one example: crowdsourcing, like what we have seen with AppsForDemocracy, AppsForAmerica or Recovery.gov. [...]
6 Why IT Could Derail Government 2.0 // Jul 3, 2009 at 6:34 am
[...] (of information) that threatens the status quo? What happens when a government organization starts crowdsourcing the design of a web site? What happens when “we, the people” become software developers? What happens when the case for [...]
7 GSA Awards Recovery.gov Implementation To An Unlikely Web 2.0 Player // Jul 13, 2009 at 4:15 am
[...] whether the Alliant contract vehicle is the most appropriate for something that initially started under the aegis of crowdsourcing and is likely to be under intense public scrutiny over the next several [...]
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