Rock Creek Roundup (December 11 Edition)

Posted by: Meagen Ryan, Director of Strategy Dec 11, 2009 0 Comments

The White House gives agencies 45 days to begin transparency efforts, the SAVE Qward announces its four finalists, a team from MIT solves the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge in a mere nine hours, and Greg Finn shares 12 Social Media Resolutions, all in this week’s Rock Creek Roundup:

—Earlier this week, the Obama Administration’s Vivek Kundra, Aneesh Chopra, and Macon Phillips held a live chat to announce the Open Government Initiative (PDF), a directive aimed at making government more transparent and open to the public. Among the timelines laid out by the plan:

• In the next 45 days, federal agencies must make available to the public three meaningful datasets. It’s up to each agency to decide which of their datasets present the opportunity for the highest value when shared with the public.
  
• In the next 60 days, White House CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra must develop an online dashboard that lets citizens monitor the progress that agencies are making toward achieving their transparency milestones.
  
• In the next 120 days, agencies must have a plan in place to effective “build in” openness and transparency within their organizations.
  

The Initiative is receiving quite a bit of buzz with most of the reactions, including our own, being extremely positive. It will be exciting to see how federal agencies meet the directives set out in the initiative and what the public does once they have access to this government data.

—The finalists have been announced in the Administration’s Securing Americans Values and Efficiency (or SAVE) Award. Chosen from among the 38,000 ideas submitted, the finalists’ ideas include online scheduling for Social Security appointments, allowing VA patients to take their medicine with them after discharge, simplifying how visitor fees and other funds are collected at national recreation centers, and bringing a stop to redundant inspections that currently occur within the Housing and Urban Development department. The winning idea will be submitted for inclusion in the FY 2011 budget. We think that no matter which idea wins, the taxpayers win.

—Remember the DARPA contest we announced in the Rock Creek Roundup a few weeks ago? In the contest, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Internet, people’s social networking and collaboration skills were put to the test via the challenge of finding large red balloons hidden throughout the United States. Well, the contest went live this week and was solved in less than 9 hours by the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team. The MIT team decided to use the potential $40,000 prize money as an incentive to get people involved, offering $2000 to the first person who registered the correct balloon coordinates on the MIT Red Balloon Challenge website and $1000 to the person who invited them (assuming that the MIT Team won, of course). What a fascinating case study in social networking, with many lessons that can be applied in the real world. You can learn more about the specifics of how the MIT team made it happen by checking out this interview with one of the project’s leaders.

—Though geared toward businesses, Greg Finn’s 12 Social Media New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 are still relevant for government agencies, as well. Among other suggestions Finn makes are to track mentions of your company (or agency) name and conversations occurring “in the wild,” and to choose tracking tools that have data archiving and exporting functionality so that you can store and share results with others. The article is definitely worth a read, especially as you’re mapping out social media plans and strategies for your agency in 2010.

Meagen Ryan

Director of Strategy

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