In his latest blog post, Richard Branson writes that contest prizes work because they inflame our natural competitive fire. He just may have a point. The Knight News Challenge awarded $3.2 million to eight innovators, who are making government sizzle.
Here are the eight winners:
- Procure.io – Open source procurement software that makes it easier for both local, state or federal government to create RFPs and for contractors/suppliers to bid on those procurement opportunities. If this seems similar to RFP-EZ, that’s because the Presidential Innovation Fellow program inspired Procure.io.
- Plan-in-a-Box – An open source web publishing tool that enables governments to quickly and easily create a polished, engaging web presence for community projects to generate excitement and participation among volunteers and supporters.
- Oyez Project – Began as a project of the Chicago-Kent College of Law as a multimedia archive for US Supreme Court decisions, including audio of oral arguments. With support from the Knight Foundation, the technology developed by the college is expanded to open source software to make state and appellate court documents easily accessible.
- Civic Insight – The group that worked in Civic Insight worked earlier on BlightStatus, which is a project of the city government of New Orleans to make up-to-date information on rundown properties to citizens. Civic Insight is a natural expansion of that platform. It is an open source system that government can use to make all types of data easily available to citizens, from records and forms to project progress information.
- Outline.com – Is a simulation game that enables citizens to find out quickly what the financial impact of various budget proposals would potentially be on them. The group offers a demonstration for Chrome and Safari browsers.
- GitMachines – Is a specialized open source project that supplies “canned, out-of-the-box” server set-up and management software for organizations. Setting up and maintaining servers complex and expensive, especially for perpetually cash-strapped governments. By piggy-backing on the technology developed by Amazon, Netflix, and others, the group developed software that government can use at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions to get servers up and running faster.
- Smart Communities – Is a Chicago-based project to train, educate, and enlighten citizens living in moderate and low-income neighborhoods to get connected and to learn what resources the internet can bring to them, “from education to economic development, from safety to youth programs.”
- Open Counter – Started in Santa Cruz, California as a way to make the laborious permitting process of starting a new business quick and easy. As the developers explain, Open Counter brings the services online that would normally require several trips to City Hall and a lot of wasted time and frustration. Not anymore.
The power of government in the hands of the people it’s designed to serve can be creative, engaging, and energizing. Now, if some of you guys could go down to the DMV …