innovation

Getting crowdsourcing right

Steph has a great post about crowdsourcing in government:

It’s human nature to want to work on your own projects, rather than those imposed upon you. It’s human nature to want to earn recognition, intellectual satisfaction and a good living from your work. So instead of asking civil servants to sift thousands of ideas and assign half a dozen to people around Whitehall to ‘take forward’, why not put proper money behind a few big challenges, and support civil servants, frontline staff and whoever-the-hell-wants-to to band together to spend time and money solving them?

Go and read it – it’s good!

Wisdom of Crowds

I’ve been working on this post – the one you’re reading now – for literally months. Steph has inspired me to get the damn thing finally published. One book I have found really useful is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, which is well worth a read.

There have been a couple of high profile attempts to crowdsource ideas and opinion recently by central government in the UK, which comes on the back of similar activities in other countries. Neither worked particularly well, and having had the time to ruminate on why that might be, I thought I’d put some ideas out there.

Getting this right is important, not least for those of us that what to see open government progress in this country; participation being one of the three major strands of what open government is.

So what can we learn from Your Freedom and Spending Challenge?

1. Are you asking people to do the right things?

Crowdsourcing in government is used for a number of purposes, but quite often it’s down to getting people to suggest ideas. One of the problems is of course that coming up with ideas is the easy bit – it’s implementing them that’s hard.

But some of the best examples of crowdsourcing on the internet just aren’t this open ended. Indeed, the success of these initiatives tend to be in providing people with small, defined tasks such as:

These can be seen as being ‘mechanical turk’ type activities and as per the quote from Steph above they are examples of not just people being asked their opinions in a one-off fashion, but groups of people working towards a common goal, contributing when and how they feel able.

2. Don’t keep rebuilding the same community

It strikes me, thinking about it, that building a new website, promoting it and getting people to engage with it, every time government wants to ask people stuff isn’t a very efficient way of going about things.

I remember reading Stephen Coleman’s The Internet and Democratic Citizenship and not really agreeing with one of its central premises, that we need an online ‘civic commons’ – a central space for all the internet enabled participation in democracy and government to happen. It just struck me as the sort of thing that government could well be very bad at – some sort of DirectGov for engagement and consultation.

But, then, maybe it does make sense to have the one place where as much of this stuff happens as possible sits. It means people only have to sign up for one site, could get notified of new exercises that might interest them, and so on. It might also provide the scale to enable a full time community manager or two to be appointed, which would help massively with some of the moderation issues that these sites sometimes run into.

3. The role of expertise

One of the big questions around crowdsourcing is the issue of expertise. It’s fine asking Joe Public what he thinks about something, but quite another to expect him to have considered views on what might be esoteric and complicated subjects.

Perhaps this is where making use of existing communities could really come into play. When you are looking to get the views of people who really know what they are talking about, perhaps the best thing to do is to go to where those people are already hanging out and talking about this stuff. For those interested in this approach, the Meet the Communities event should be well worth attending.

4. Quick returns

The Cathedral & the BazaarGoing back to open source software development, one key thing Linus Torvalds, who led the Linux project, did to encourage participation was to ensure there were quick returns from contributors. Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, noted that Linux gave contributors the stimulation of being involved in something cool and important and gave fast feedback and results, sometimes more than daily.

It strikes me that  number of attempts at crowdsourcing in government don’t have anywhere near a short enough timescale for feedback. Throwing ideas and contributions into a black hole that a civil servant at some undefined point in the future might take a look at, and might get in touch with you about, isn’t to me a particularly thrilling proposition.

Any more?

So there are my four takeaways for people wanting to run government crowdsourcing exercises. Anyone got any others?

(Before I go, do visit Catherine Howe’s blog, which is full on ruminations on this stuff, as well as hundreds more great book recommendations!)

10 rules to start innovating

Little Innovation BookJames Gardner‘s Little Innovation Book is a great read for anyone who has an interesting in getting their team, department or organisation doing things differently. Not only is it short, and very practical, it’s also cheap – you can read it online for free, or buy an ebook version for a few quid.

Innovation seems almost a dirty word at times. I lose count of the number of times I see people putting on their lists of words they cannot bear. I don’t understand why this is; maybe because most people and organisations are so bad at it? I should think that would mean we ought to be talking about it more, in that case!

It strikes me that we need good innovation now, in government, more than ever. After all, what with the budget cuts, things are going to have to change one way or another. The two ideas that seem to be emerging from local government are shared services and outsourcing. I’m sure we can do better than that?

Anyhow, James’ book is made up of 10 rules for innovating. Am sure he won’t mind me reproducing them here, with a quick description of each. If you want more (including some great case studies), you’ll have to read the book.

  1. Create an Innovation Strategy First – decide what your innovation aim is and how you can best get there: do nothing, play to win, or play not to lose
  2. Define What Innovation Means – “one has to have an understanding of what will be acceptable as outputs from innovators before one starts to be innovative”
  3. Make Sure the Role of Innovators is Clear – are those with responsibility for innovation actually involved in innovating, or in promoting a culture of innovation?
  4. Have a Connection to the Money – innovators must ensure they get some budget, although not too much – but have to justify it to the bean counters
  5. Address the 3 Big Myths – which are that 1) ideas are the most important thing; 2) innovation is all about big hits; and 3) innovation is risky, unpredictable and a luxury
  6. Manage the Technologists – “The key to co-operation is to find a trigger point which allows Information Technology to contribute within the boundaries of their prioritization framework without alienating them altogether”.
  7. Answer the 3 Key Questions – which are: ‘Can we do this?’, ‘Should we do this?’ and ‘When?’.
  8. Drown the Puppy – to keep returns on innovation projects high, get used to killing the ones which probably won’t work out.
  9. Share Everything – “innovators who talk about their work, share their knowledge, and network widely seem to be much more successful than those who don’t”.
  10. Manage the People – have you got the right group of people in the team to work on the innovation project and make it work?

Bookmarks for July 28th through August 5th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Innovation in Public Services: Small is Beautiful

An interesting item on NESTA’s website, with some accompanying useful resources, summarising the recent launch of the ‘Small is Beautiful’ paper on innovation in local government.

NESTA supported the Local Government Information Unit to analyse the entries to its ‘Small is Beautiful’ competition, which asked local authorities to submit examples of innovation they had implemented in non-statutory services.

Glyn Gaskarth from the LGIU described the entries received and what they suggest about the state of innovation in local government. Glyn noted the number and diversity of the entries received, but also that the key to their success was that they were often led by small teams with small budgets. While some of the examples might seem quite marginal from a national perspective, they have made a decisive difference to their local area (for example, in reducing offending or improving social cohesion), and some of them could be seen as the ‘Big Society’ in action. Glyn outlined the main proposal from the report – that local authorities could establish a new way to encourage and support these types of activities by creating innovation funds drawn from their own discretionary spending.

The Small is Beautiful paper is here (PDF warning).

At the event, Rochford District Council provided a case study of the work they have been doing to support local retailers, called ‘Shop at My Local’. Here’s the slides (again, PDF warning).

In the following discussion several barriers were identified:

  • While there was a shared recognition of the barriers (such as funding, risk-aversion and evaluating the benefits), there was some concern about the risk of painting too negative a picture of the ability of local government to innovate, and so this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was also noted the many large private sector organisations face similar challenges in establishing a pro-innovation culture.
  • Many in the audience pointed out that local government could make more use of the resources and organisations that already exist in order to innovate, from volunteers and the third sector, to funders such as NESTA, in lieu of establishing their own funds.
  • Similarly, there was a lot of discussion about existing mechanisms used by local authorities to support innovation, for example the Innovation Unit described the innovation lab they are helping Knowsley to establish, and another member of the audience highlighted the Local Strategic Partnerships that have innovation boards and funds.
  • There was, however, shared concern that time was against us, and that many of the innovative approaches such as those highlighted in the report, and the mechanisms that can support them (such as local invest-to-save budgets), are now at risk of being cut in the current age of austerity.

There’s more on NESTA’s website – including a whole load of resources for innovation in public services.

Thanks to Dom for highlighting this in his link round up.

Prototyping

Robert Brook:

I’m more interested in tactics than strategy. Other people can do strategy – they certainly want to and they’re better at it than I am. My tactical interest in in tools, services and methods that support delivery. Actual things. Stuff.

I consider prototyping to be a key part of this approach. The division between prototyping and production used to be clear – it’s much less so now.

James Governor:

Effective prototyping is essential for corporate pace layering of IT assets and governance. But if someone is telling you the prototype they want to build can’t actually be put into production well, that’s bait and switch isn’t it? Beware consultants bearing prototypes. If you have a good in-house development team on the other hand they will actually learn from building the prototype. And with any luck they’ll be able to put it into production. IT prototypes should not be like Concept Cars – but more like a sketch that can be filled in, added to, and made into “the finished article”. A prototype should be more like a scaffold and less like a facade.

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