Challenge & Prize Competition Round-Up
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We’ve had an excellent year of training and community events for the federal challenge and prize community, so for the month of December DigitalGov University has taken a look at the events we’ve hosted this year and rounded them up in line with this month’s Crowdsourcing theme.
On Wednesday, December 10, the Challenge and Prize Community of Practice hosted its quarterly in-person meeting to highlight the roles and responsibilities that Challenge.gov, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House, NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) and federal agencies play in hosting and executing challenge and prize competitions. There were two panels of experienced managers that gave attendees insight into the institutionalization of prizes at their agencies and what makes-up a successful challenge. Finally, attendees were also able to garner exactly what they need to provide for the America COMPETES annual Congressional reporting.
This event brought together more than 70 practitioners in-person and online, and we’ll be sharing the clips from the livestream in the very near future. Now here’s a look at our other events.
The New Challenge.gov
Challenge.gov added new features recently and has pulled the full federal list and competition management tools onto the new platform. It now enables agencies to create and manage their competitions on a robust back-end platform. You can learn more about the Challenge.gov platform and how to use Challenge.gov in these two webinars.
Open-Sourced Ideation Platform
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) also presented their open sourced ideation tool, IdeaBox, to the community in October of this year. This event showcased how you can build an innovation program by leveraging CFPB’s open-source ideation platform, replicating their lightweight staffing model, and using their playbook of resources. They use the platform to crowdsource ideas from employees across the agency. IdeaBox source code is shared openly on Github for anybody to use.
Getting Started
But, if you are just getting started hosted some events that will jump-start your thinking and help you develop a plan of attack. First, we hosted Cristin Dorgelo, former Assistant Director for Grand Challenges at the Office of Science Technology and Policy at the White House, to give a rundown of how challenge and prize initiatives can benefit your agency and steps you need to take to get started.
You may also be interested in watching Why Your Challenge & Prize Competition Needs a Communication Strategy. In this event, learn why a robust communications plan is essential to a successful challenge, what methods of communication you should think about, what has worked and not worked for The Desal Prize, and how you can structure your prize competition communication strategy.
If you are thinking about launching a video competition then you may be interested in watching Running a Successful Video Challenge. The presenter for this event, Jason Crusan, Director CoECI NASA, presents a case study of how NASA has used professional crowdsourcing for video creation. Tammi Marcoullier, Challenge.gov Program Manager, reviews getting from A to B, or how to decide what kind of video challenge you want to execute by examining your goals.
Finally, you can take a look at the summary of our event on Design Thinking and how this workshop helped folks working on challenge and prize competitions think through the design and execution of their challenge. Enjoy! For more events around challenge and prize competitions check out our Events Calendar. For questions about Challenge.gov or the Challenge & Prize Community of Practice email Challenge@gsa.gov.
