Citizen Driven Technology Innovation in Government
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Challenge
The City of Washington, DC needed a better way to make DC.government's revolutionary Data Catalogue (http://data.octo.dc.gov) useful for the citizens, visitors, businesses and government agencies of Washington, DC. The Data Catalogue contains all manner of open public data featuring real-time crime feeds, school test scores, and poverty indicators, and is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world.
Solution
We knew that the old way of spending millions of taxpayer dollars with big, slow contractors was a broken model in need of fixing. Our answer was to hold an innovation contest where we put the data in the hands of our talented citizens, and gave them cash prizes and recognition for their efforts in developing technology for their neighbors and city government.
We therefore created Apps for Democracy.
Results
This contest cost Washington, DC $50,000 and returned 47 iPhone, Facebook and web applications with an estimated value in excess of $2,300,000 to the city. This figure was provided by DC’s Office of Chief Technology Officer as a sum of the individual costs to develop the apps, plus the internal human resources that it would have cost the city to procure and manage the project. That’s a 4000%+ ROI. Apps for Democracy reduced the time it would take to create new technology for the DC government from an estimated two-year period to 30 days. We brought the entire contest framework to life and launched it to the world in six days.
APPS08 has gone on to inspire the Apps for America contest by The Sunlight Foundation, INCA 09 in Belgium, and planned initiatives in Toronto, Philadelphia, New York and Finland. APPS08 is also under consideration for a United Nations Public Service Award.
Target Markets
Technology developers.