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"Are competitions and crowdsourcing the path to bringing government into the 21st century?\nThe White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy certainly thinks so. It hosted an event this week to discuss prize-based contests and recognize successful examples of their use to spur innovation in the government sector \u2014 not a place typically known as being a haven for early adopters.\nThe idea is simple: If a government agency is presented with a certain challenge (such as, \"what do we do with all this data?\"), they turn that problem over to the public and say \"help us achieve this goal, and win a prize.\" Prizes can vary, but they're usually some amount of cash to help cover the cost of working on the problem.\nTodd Park, who recently became Chief Technology Officer at the White House, did pioneering work in the government crowdsourcing arena during his tenure at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He's brought his appreciation of prize-based competitions as a method to solve tough problems with him in his new role at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.\n\"I think [prizes and competitions] are a very exciting new tool that government has in its toolkit to get better results at a lower cost,\" Park told Mashable. \"You can greatly broaden and deepen the range of players that can help solve the problem.\n\"You draw in unusual suspects along with the more usual suspects. Studies suggest people that win these contests were not the usual suspects, but their aptitude seems obvious in retrospect,\" said Park, who added that prizes can often be the initial draw, but often, the challenge of solving a problem keeps developers interested.\n\nSEE ALSO: Iceland Unveils Crowdsourced Constitution\nPark pointed to Ozioma, a platform that allows journalists to research cancer rates, as an example of a successful open collaboration project. \nOzioma \u2014 Swahili for \"good news\" \u2014 was born of an National Cancer Institute desire to use public data in an innovative way to raise cancer awareness. A team at Washington University in St. Louis figured that journalists would be able to do that if given the resources \u2014 many media outlets can't afford dedicated medical researchers \u2014 and they built the platform accordingly.\nOzioma \"ingests a huge amount of data from the government and other sources,\" said Park, \"and it enables journalists to go in and look at, say, cancer disparities by gender. That radically reduces the amount of energy required by a journalist, blogger or even just a concerned citizen to put a story together and mobilize a community to do something about cancer rates.\"\nThe White House was joined by the Case Foundation and the Joyce Foundation during this week's celebration of government crowdsourcing. Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation, has been an advocate of crowdsourcing for years, and lately she's been \"focused and jazzed by the momentum we're seeing in the public sector,\" she said. \nHow else can prize-based competition and crowdsourcing create innovation in government? Share your ideas in the comments.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, tumpikuja "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/06/13/crowdsourcing-government/>