If you've got two million employees, asking all of them for suggestions about how to do things better can be a little bit like trying to drink from a firehose. And while that might be intimidating for even the most high-tech of companies to consider, the challenge gets tougher if the organization you're trying to improve is the Federal Government. So we're excited to take a behind-the-scenes look at the
President's SAVE Award initiative. This initiative is about soliciting ideas from federal employees for how to save taxpayer dollars, but there are some larger lessons from SAVE that can show how broad input from federal employees and the public can make government run better.
SAVE's mandate is simple: Find ways to save taxpayer dollars, and make the government run more efficiently and effectively. But having a free-for-all where any one of the millions of Federal employees could throw their ideas up on a web page wouldn't just be a mess, it'd reduce the chances of success. So, what the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did was create a system that works a little bit like American Idol, if that popular TV show were a little more focused on the "American" part, and a little less focused on the "Idol".
First, the idea of the President's SAVE Award was announced to nearly all Federal employees, using technologies that were already in place, like email announcement newsletters within individual departments and agencies. This might seem obvious, but it's a pretty important bit of learning when we're thinking about how to make crowdsourcing technology: The community you're trying to reach
might already exist. Just because we tend to be talking about Web 2.0 and social networking, it can be easy to overlook traditional connecting technologies like email lists. This broad announcement acted like an open call, casting a wider net of potential contributors.
Then, once the idea was announced, idea submissions were captured from employees at the agency or department level. This serves a few useful purposes:
- Ideas could be vetted by OMB experts on those agencies, where there's the knowledge and context to judge if the idea submission was feasible, practical, and legal.
- A lot of the best ideas might be submitted multiple times. By having a review process at the agency level, a lot of redundant ideas could be filtered out.
- We're always focused at Expert Labs on how to connect with people who have the right expertise — in the case of many government agencies, they already have the expertise in-house, but just need help discovering it and amplifying the ideas of those experts.
In all, this process yielded nearly
forty thousand idea submissions, from across the country and from all levels of the government. We talked to an OMB official about what it was like to process all of these submissions, and one of the most interesting insights was discovering that some of the ideas that were submitted could actually turn into government-wide improvements, even simple ones like making sure every government building allows its employees to turn the lights off at night when they go home. So OMB held on to some of those ideas that were best implemented across the entire government, and then processed the majority of submissions through a full review, to help whittle that list down to the Final Four for everyone to vote on.
The key thing to mention here is that
technology did not make the decisions about which ideas to promote:
Humans did. What technology can do is provide platforms to quickly filter ideas, group similar or redundant ones into categories where they can be easily processed, and get lists of responses down to manageable size so that humans can efficiently review them. A lot of times, crowdsourcing is misunderstood as letting technology make decisions about ideas, but what the SAVE Award has shown is that having technology serve to amplify the good judgment of motivated people is actually quite effective. And while we'd like to imagine the human vetting process for these ideas sounded a bit like the judges on American Idol, it's likely it was probably a little more dignified an affair.
Once the broad pool of ideas was narrowed down, the White House stepped in to lend its considerable voice to helping promote these finalists, and to encourage the public at large to vote on which ideas resonated best. Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media at the White House, gave us some insights into how his team helped to encourage the public to build on OMB's efforts.
First, and most obvious, was using the President's voice to promote the idea of increasing government efficiency. This isn't just a pragmatic move to draw attention to the award, but a good sign to federal employees that this initiative is being taken seriously. It can be easy to forget, if you're outside the government, that the President is in some ways the CEO of a giant corporation with 2 million employees, and if your boss's boss's boss says "This Is Important", that's a pretty good sign that it is. So clearly, the SAVE Award was being taken seriously, and the idea of highlighting and rewarding federal employees for their good ideas gets a boost from that message.
But just as importantly, the public at large wants a voice in this kind of effort. And the White House web team was able to create a simple voting system for picking which idea to reward. From a technological implementation standpoint, the voting system is minimal: The four ideas are presented in random order in slideshow format, and a range of scores from 1 to 5 is presented underneath the idea for voting. The descriptions of the ideas are brief but clear and voting on them all takes less than a minute or two.
Voting's still open, so we haven't yet seen who's going to win, but the winner will get to meet the President, and their idea will be incorporated into the Federal Budget for fiscal year 2011. And that brings us to perhaps the most important motivator for a crowdsourcing initiative: Knowing that your submission can have an impact.
Again, this has nothing to do with internet technology or cool social networking sites, but the biggest motivator for people to contribute to a collaborative effort can be the combination of recognition and the knowledge that input will be taken seriously and have a real impact. In this case, once we see a crowdsourced idea bubble its way up from a pool of two million employees to the final four SAVE Award nominees to eventually being part of the federal budget, we'll have a remarkable example to learn from.
We'll be watching closely at Expert Labs to see how the SAVE Award succeeds, and we're excited to have examples like this to learn from and report on as we begin our own work on making it easier to tap into collective expertise.