This weekend is Social Citizen Sunday (5/17) and DC residents across the city have raised their hands to talk to their neighbors about the problems and ideas they have that can be addressed with technology.

In fact, we’ve been collecting insights online, and in the first 7 days, 140+ insights were submitted - you can read, vote on and submit your own insights here.

To participate in Social Citizen Sunday, just sign up here, and ask some friends to join you (or go it alone). There’s a $1000 prize for the best field report!

Here’s what you’ll need to do on Sunday:

1) Go to a library, church or another busy public area

2) Let people know you’re helping the city by collecting insights from your neighbors

3) Ask if they can answer this one question for you “What problems or ideas do you have for DC that you think better technology can solve?” If you can, please ask “Do you have access to high speed internet and if so, where?”

4) The answers you gather in #3 are what you’ll put into a ‘field report’. That report can take any form - video, audio, powerpoint/PDF etc. The $1000 prize will be judged based on the following:

• Quality of responses gathered
• Diversity of responses (different answers from different people in different neighborhoods)
• Quantity of responses
• Uniqueness of your field report

5) Submit your report to me via email (attachment or link to something)

All field reports are due one week from Social Citizen Sunday on 5/24 by midnight (that’s Memorial Day weekend so you might want to finish the report earlier). Feel free to collect insights during the week following Social Citizen Sunday. Also let us know what neighborhoods your insights came from.

TIPS FOR INSIGHTS COLLECTION:

1) Create a Google Form, so you can use it on your laptop or mobile phone as you talk to people.

2) Use a tool like Utterli or Tumblr to ‘live blog’ the insights you capture for later use in your report.

3) Use Twitter with the #APPS09 hashtag and and your own hashtag so you can go back and reference those tweets (you can use twitter to capture insight from anyone this way too).

4) Use a Mino Flip cam, a laptop with web cam, cell phone video cam or another video device for grabbing quick interviews.

Please leave any questions in the comments on this post so other can benefit from the answers.