Promote Innovation Through Collaboration and Harness the Ingenuity of the American Public (US0049)

Creating a more Open Government and addressing our Nation’s most challenging issues requires an informed and active citizenry. Recognizing the value of the American public as a strategic partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges, the United States will work to more effectively harness the expertise, ingenuity, and creativity of the American public by enabling, accelerating, and scaling the use of open innovation methods across the Federal Government, including commitments to:
-Create an Open Innovation Toolkit. In 2014, the Administration will convene an interagency group to develop an “open innovation toolkit” for Federal agencies that will include best practices, training, policies, and guidance on authorities related to open innovation, including approaches such as incentive prizes, crowdsourcing, and citizen science.
-New Incentive Prizes and Challenges on Challenge.gov. The U.S. Government champions the use of challenges, prizes, and competitions to catalyze breakthroughs in national priorities. Launched on September 2010, Challenge.gov has hosted more than 300 crowdsourcing competitions, and the platform has been used by more than 50 Federal departments and agencies. The website will continue to provide public listings of new competitions offered by the Administration to engage citizens in solving difficult problems to help agencies achieve their missions.
-Increased Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Programs. Public participation in scientific research, one type of crowdsourcing known as “citizen science”, allows the public to make critical contributions to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math by collecting, analyzing, and sharing a wide range of data. The Administration will expand its use of crowdsourcing and citizen science programs to further engage the public in problem-solving. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will seek to drastically increase the number of asteroid observations by the amateur astronomer community as part of the Asteroid Grand Challenge. NASA will also launch the third International Space Apps Challenge in 2014, building upon the previously successful International Space Apps Challenges to continue to use publicly-released data to solve global challenges. In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency will expand its citizen science activities, such as leveraging crowdsourcing to monitor water quality; NARA will increase its citizen archivist crowdsourcing projects that make records more accessible online to include captioning of historical films and transcription of other Federal records by the public; and the U.S. Geological Survey will expand its National Map Corps program to use public input to improve the National Map.