dan mcquillan's List: social computing IS52026B - lecture 16

• It even instructed the White House Office of Management and Budget to publish guidance on how agencies can develop innovation challenges in the federal space, and maintain compliance with existing procurement laws. As such, we’ve seen in just a few short months, a handful of innovation challenges pop up:

    
   
  •   Apps for Healthy Kids (USDA)
   
  •   Apps for the Army (DOD)
   
  •   Apps for Inclusion (FCC)
• For us at Sunlight, the not-so-big secret was that it was never about the apps
• A win for our contest program was Jim Gilliam. Jim participated in our first apps contest with “Hello, Congress” that is now GuvLuv.org. Jim entered that contest, became an avid member of the Sunlight Labs Google Group got inspired, and built act.ly not out of any apps incentive, but because he was inspired. Jim’s now building a business around that work.

• See— the purpose of our contests weren’t to generate apps, but to build community. It’s to create a sustainable community of support and connection for the people who are eager to help out. The contests were an incentive model to build a long-term community of developers.

   
• Along with folks like the Sunlight Foundation and OpenPlans.org, Government should build developer ecosystems.
• Look to what Todd Park is doing over at HHS with the Community Health Data Initiative as an example. 18 months from now, as a result of keeping the eyes-on-the-community-prize, HHS will have a community rather than a bunch of apps. HHS will get its own Jim Gilliams — empowering new businesses to start, and ordinary citizens to take part in change.

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• Femi Longe, based in Nigeria, tells us that 10 years ago the country had only 866,000 telephone lines. Now, in a population of 116 million, there are 88 million mobile subscribers – mostly young people. His newly established Co-Creation Hub, independent from government, is working on 16 different ventures. They include apps that will tell citizens about their constitutional rights (Your Rights in Your Pocket), apps to help students with study, and apps to encourage greater transparency and less corruption in the government's budget (BudgeIT).