U.S. Government's Open Initiatives Found to be Groundbreaking

All of the White House’s recent forays into the world of crowdsourcing for its initiatives have been assessed against different paradigms of “collective intelligence”. Researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto have used the Genome for Collective Intelligence to measure the Obama Administration's open government initiatives and found them to be at least partly game-changing.

Of over 100 initiatives, everything from nationwide brainstorming exercises such as the innovation in education platform, to fully-fledged innovation programs like the public healthcare innovation challenge were investigated. Only a tiny fraction could be described within the existing MIT-developed framework, which, up to now, has been used to standardize private sector ventures.

The research was presented as part of the Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference 2010, which focused on government initiatives.  On the back of this newfound ‘inadequacy’ of the genome system, a few expansions to the model were proposed: Interest, Civic Duty, Evaluate, Feedback-public and Feedback-not public.

The full paper is available for in-depth conclusions but, in essence, the new, expanded framework has been tested and tweaked to include and accurately quantify crowdsourced ventures. Crowdsourcing, under the banner of collective intelligence, is another step closer to being a standard practice in government, charity and business.