Creating Impact from Governmental Open Data (OD): Innovation Process Transparency in OD Contest Design

公开政府信息可以促进创新。天气和GPS数据的发布导致了天气频道和商业农业咨询服务的出现，这些都是创造公共利益的新应用的历史例子。2009年启动的“开放政府”倡议提供了几十万个能源、卫生和教育等领域的机器可读数据集。然而，尽管有潜在的公共利益，但人们担心这个政府开放数据的平台没有充分激发公民参与，导致应用程序减少。增加这些数据的访问和可用性将导致更有效地利用政府数据，以造福美国公民。本项目考察了利用创新竞赛来开发使用开放政府数据的解决方案。创新竞赛涉及一大群非专业用户、开发人员、企业家和政府官员，他们共同开发解决方案。联邦政府参与这类竞赛（例如Challenge.gov）。该项目测试了另一种竞争设计，这种设计促进了透明度和鼓励合作。这项研究涉及数百名参与者的实地实验。参与者集体决定要解决什么问题，并分享他们对群体创造的创新解决方案的看法。实地实验考虑了共享不同类型的创新相关知识和提高决策透明度的替代机制，以推动公民参与并刺激开发新颖有用的开放数据解决方案。

Making governmental information publicly available can fuel innovation. The release of weather and GPS data led to the Weather Channel and commercial agricultural advisory services as historical examples of novel applications that created public benefit. The Open Government initiative, launched in 2009, provides access to several hundred thousand machine-readable datasets in areas such as energy, health, and education. However, despite the potential for public benefit there are concerns that this platform for governmental open data does not sufficiently spur civic participation, resulting in fewer applications. Increasing access and usability of these data would result in more effective use of government data for the benefit of American citizens. This project examines the use of innovation contests as a way to develop solutions that use open governmental data. Innovation contests involve a large crowd of non-expert users, developers, entrepreneurs, and government officials who jointly develop solutions. The Federal Government engages in such contests (e.g. Challenge.gov). This project tests an alternative competition design that fosters transparency and encourages collaboration. The study involves field experiments with several hundred participants. Participants collectively decide what problems to solve and share their perspectives towards the innovative solutions created by the crowd. The field experiments consider alternative mechanisms for sharing different types of innovation-related knowledge and for increasing transparent decision making in order to drive citizen participation and spur the development of novel and useful open data solutions.