Apps for Democracy

iStrategyLabs Announces Apps for Democracy - An Innovation Contest

2008 October 12th
Comments

I wish I could say we’ve been working on launching Apps for Democracy “for months” and now we’re ready for prime time….

The reality is that we’ve had 6 days to pull together this entire program!!! So, if you see a bug, typo, broken anything, please let us know so we can fix it.

What you’re about to witness has not been done before as far as we know. Here’s how Apps or Democracy is unique:

1. It is born of a private sector (iStrategyLabs) and public sector (The DC Government’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer) collaboration which seeks to produce technology innovations that will serve the interest of not only the government agencies, residents, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC, but also provide ‘an innovation contest’ model and a base of open source applications other municipalities can build upon. This is about saving our own money by utilizing smarter, faster, cheaper, community sourced technology development practices for the betterment of all.

2. The ability of DC.gov to move this fast is compelling in and of itself. Under the leadership of their visionary CTO, Vivek Kundra the process for sourcing and deploying technology for he government is beginning to move at lightning speeds and cost penny on the dollar. This really is Government 2.0 and and OCTO is leading the way!

3. The technologies and methods we’re employing are considered to be best practices in social media technology utilization and community based marketing. We’re running Wordpress 2.6.2, aggregating twitter hashtags (#APPS08), utilizing EventBrite for registration/email distribution and have setup an Ning network for virtual collaboration and a Facebook Group, Facebook Event, Flickr Group, Clearspring Widget and more. This configuration is new for the DC Government, and the combination of these technologies have enabled us to build in 6 days, what takes some companies 6 months and 6 figures in fees.

We hope you’ll register and compete for a prize or two!

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6 comments to...
“iStrategyLabs Announces Apps for Democracy - An Innovation Contest”
John Verba
October 14th, 2008

It would be good to know what actual NEEDS the people and the government have. Getting solutions for pennies on the dollar can often reflect the real-world worth of the solutions. The smartest solutions developers would want to know, first, what problems exist that we are developing solutions FOR?

Obviously tech developers and those wanting to mine, mash (or even spin) data are VERY different people. As someone who was there told me about Doyle Dane Bernbach in the 70s, the way to approach the creative process is to “start where THEY are.” So…who are they, and where are they, and where do they want to go?

Can there be a parallel outreach to potential users so the developers aren’t being asked to imagine someone they don’t know or to craft solutions that mostly impress themselves and other developers? Can there be a blog set up in which potential users get to describe their dream app, why they need it and how they’d use it?

Thanks!

John


iStrategyLabs
October 14th, 2008

@john Great comment! There is a forum here for that kind of discussion: http://apps08.ning.com/forum


John Verba
October 14th, 2008

Great. Now it would be good to publicize it to the community of potential users, because the moderator’s first comment about people not wanting to, perhaps, reveal their best ideas would suggest that its readers will be developers, not users.

Potential users should have no hesitance to say, “Can someone out there get me a FileMaker-based solution that will let me massage the Construction Projects database to bring up all residential developments coming online three months out from a given date?”

I’d think the reality is that what users NEED may seem quite mundane, and what developers WANT TO CREATE might be so esoteric as to never gain traction with users. (Or maybe I’ve been in too many meetings with association folks determinedly voicing, “How do we make people realize how much they NEED this (online yellow pages with 10 listings, total)?” ; )


Peter Corbett
October 14th, 2008

@John Can you lead that conversation on http://apps08.ning.com? That would be greatly appreciated!

Peter


John Verba
October 14th, 2008

Peter. No, but thanks for the offer. : ) I’m overly swamped, but I took the time to comment because it seemed that you guys are both enthused and proactive, and so it made sense to suggest, “OK, are you going to now do what the top five market leaders in any industry do, and deliver what the market wants, or do what the next 100 or more small businesses do, and deliver what you want to deliver?” Everything hinges on who you’re most out to meets the needs of, really.


David James
October 15th, 2008

I wrote a comment inspired by what John wrote in the Ning forum, here:
http://apps08.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2385602%3ATopic%3A94


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Our Sponsors

The District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) which is responsible for DC technology infrastructure and provides a Data Catalog, which provides real-time data from multiple agencies to citizens - a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations. Apps for Democracy participants will compete to visualize this data in a manner that is most useful for all.

RSVP to Build Apps for Democracy!

iStrategyLabs is a digital agency focused on providing clients with interactive strategy, experiential marketing and content creation services. We've created Apps for Democracy to fulfill the DC Government's Office of the Chief Technology Officer's need for visualizing their Data Catalog for the benefit of citizens, visitors and businesses of DC. We hope this model for technology innovation can be adopted by other municipalities in order to strengthen their own technology communities by developing open source solutions for the good of all. Please contact Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategyLabs with any questions regarding this contest, or to run one in your city.