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The Next Policy Challenge

A Policy Foresight / Crowdsourcing Experiment

@PolicyChallenge

Summary: The School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University is leading the development of the next iteration of this participatory platform (building on the 2011-2012 Policy Challenge). This document is meant to facilitate wider discussions and feedback on design proposals for the next round, and to help engage new partners in this project.

Overview: The ASU School of Public Affairs is leading the development of The Next Policy Challenge, a follow-up to the 2011-2012 Policy Challenge. The Next Policy Challenge is a policy foresight exercise, focussed on the policy challenges that may face the United States over the coming decade as economic transformation, technological advancement, environmental change and social adaptation come together in powerful new ways. What will be the pressing, complex policy challenges facing us in the 2020s, what changes to our governance arrangements will such challenges require, what new inter-agency collaborations will be necessary and how can we start preparing now to be resilient in the face of unknown challenges in the future?

Where the Next Policy Challenge differs from traditional expert-led policy foresight exercises is in its focus on the latent power of collective intelligence to consider this problem of how to prepare for an uncertain future using open ideation and collaboration. A first stage open ideation process will use the IdeaScale platform to have the crowd propose and rank a top ten list of emerging, complex public policy challenges currently flying below the radar. Subsequent stages will test the hypothesis proposed by the social media researcher Clay Shirky that the next great frontier in open source collaboration lies in re-purposing open source software development platforms such as GitHub for the development of text documents. In a second stage of the Next Policy Challenge, teams and individuals will use the GitHub platform to develop a stage one list of ten future policy challenges into more fully-developed statements of those problems coupled with robust, sophisticated policy proposals for building a resilient policy response apparatus.

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The First Policy Challenge

high-quality submissions;
high-profile finale in Washington.

solution / administrative disconnect;
limited research agenda;
challenges - a crowded field.

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Upside

DOWNside

2012

The Policy Challenge (2012)

In response to the December 2011 White House - Startup America Policy Challenge, sixteen partner institutions designed and executed The Policy Challenge, a national administrative policy proposal competition.

Running from January 30 to May 21, 2012, the Policy Challenge asked public administration students, faculty, practitioners and the general public to build on the results of the Startup America Policy Challenge to propose innovative, viable, and actionable plans for administrative change in education, clean energy, and healthcare.

Continuing participation was scaffolded across two proposal stages of competition, culminating in a finale event.

A short-form proposal stage ran from January 30 to April 2 and was “open to the American public”. Individuals and small teams were invited to submit a two-page short-form proposal, addressing the challenge of using new technologies in the administration of education, clean energy, and healthcare. A judging panel selected three finalist teams in each of the three issue areas, with those teams invited to participate in the next stage.

In the long-form proposal stage, running from April 17 to May 11, each of the nine finalist teams were asked to develop a 15-page long-form proposal that elaborated on their initial idea in consultation with content experts.

The competition culminated in The Policy Challenge Finale on May 21 2012, where the finalist teams presented their proposals to high-level representatives of the federal agencies and a panel of expert judges. The winning team in each issue area were announced at the finale and their proposals were shared with the Cabinet Secretary from the relevant federal agency. A subsequent NSF-funded workshop reflecting on “Participatory Challenge Platforms with a Public Intent” was held the next day. Full reports on The Policy Challenge and the Workshop are available online.

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The Next Policy Challenge

A Policy Foresight Exercise

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What will be the big, complex policy challenges facing a new President and Congress in 2025? How can we start preparing now?

geo-engineering

android workers

driverless cars

life-extending healthcare

rural depopulation

artificial intelligence

cryptocurrencies

catastrophic asteroid impact

infectious disease

end of oil

democratic legitimacy crisis

climate change impacts

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The Next Policy Challenge

A Crowdsourcing Experiment

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Can a crowdsourcing approach produce useful policy foresight that rivals a closed, expert, process?

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Crowdsourcing Experiment 1

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Crowd Proposes Policy Challenges

Crowd Ranks Challenges into a Top Ten List

Parallel Expert Policy Foresight Process

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Crowdsourcing Experiment 2

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Repos

Forks

Commits

Pull Requests

Crowd-created Policy Issues Papers

GitHub is the most-used open source project hosting site in the world

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Project Design

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Core policy foresight question: What are the emerging, important, complex policy challenges that lie in front of us over the coming decade, that we are not currently paying much - if any - attention to?

Core research question:

analysis of the process: under what conditions and for what purposes is crowdsourcing an effective process for policy analysis and development?
comparison to closed processes: does crowdsourcing exceed the insights and outputs from expert-led processes?

The prima facie purpose of The Next Policy Challenge is as a policy foresight exercise. But the project is also designed as a test of the emerging ideas that have been advanced in the open governance domain. Are crowds truly wise, under what conditions and for what purposes is crowdsourcing an effective process for policy analysis and development, and does crowdsourcing exceed the insights and outputs from expert-led processes? What unintended consequences emerge in open ideation processes, especially in light of the differing motives and agendas that participants bring to the process? What characteristics of open collaboration systems function to bring together dispersed groups? Does the presence of some reward - albeit non-monetary, recognition based, or implicit - challenge the very nature of open collaboration? Through a combination of data collected through the IdeaScale and GitHub platforms, and through surveys and interviews with participants, the Next Policy Challenge is design as much as an experiment testing the rhetoric of open governance as it is a policy foresight competition.

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Stage 1 Design Questions

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Who is this “crowd”?

What if no-one shows up?

All things in moderation?

who is this “crowd”? The first Policy Challenge was principally a student competition. How open should the Next Policy Challenge be?
should we monitor and moderate? Can any “policy” issue make the list?
what if no one shows up? the “challenge” field is crowded - how does the NPC stand out?

The “crowd”: anyone with an Internet connection? Registration required (email? 3rd party - e.g., Facebook?)? IP checking to limit multiple voting?

Moderation: can the crowd be trusted? What if ideas are poorly formed, lack originality, are trivial, stupid, overtly political? What if agenda groups get their pet policy on the board and vote it up using social media (e.g., "gay marriage is a threat to the future of the United States"); What about sarcasm, humor (e.g., "build a Death Star"); vandalism, hackers?

Profile: what if no one shows up? What if a small number of ideas emerges?

What does stage one success looks like: 1000 people participate. 100 ideas proposed - combine to about 35 unique problems. Voting yields a top ten.

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Stage 2 Design Questions

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Circumventing GitHub?

The very steep GitHub curve

“Forking” without attribution?

Stealing pull requests?

will teams circumvent GitHub? how to build in criteria that both encourages and rewards open collaboration?

who owns ideas? can ownership be managed?

what if people can’t navigate GitHub? steep learning curve, may be a bar to entry

what if no one shows up?

Incentives: every team goes to ground and just uses GitHub as a submission platform;

Ownership: stealing ideas from other repos; pull request are rejected but the ideas later incorporated without acknowledgement; people don't get credit for their ideas; fights over ownership;

Learning GitHub: how to lower barrier to playing on GitHub;

Profile: nobody plays;

What does stage two and three success looks like: 10 repos are dropped. 100 teams of various sizes (from one to x) immediately fork them. Some of these are closed (meaning that they ignore pull requests and requests to join), some are open. Independents join open teams. Disagreements about new pull requests lead to new forks; teams coalesce, and break apart. By the end of round 2, 125 repos in ten categories exist. 20 are flagged as focus repos, though all remain on the platform. The teams running the 20 focus repos are highlighted and must declare themselves open or closed. These then expand to 15 pages (stage 3) to meet the deadline.

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Benefits

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Engaging for

Broad Involvement

Teaching Collaborative Agility

Developing Policy Foresight

Researching the wisdom of crowds, and how to do crowdsourcing better

engaging for broad involvement: stage one provides platform for easy involvement, from idea proposal to voting.
educating for collaborative agility: stages two and three are a platform for learning how to collaborate in the open.
preparing for the unexpected: end result is a policy foresight binder (and comparison to expert led process).

This framing of The Next Policy Challenge would represent a significant shift from the first policy challenge. Where the focus in the first round was on viable and actionable plans for administrative change using new technologies, a policy horizon scanning exercise focused on emerging policy challenges would be much more speculative and less easily translatable into immediate implementation. With a focus on complex policy problems, not easily solvable by traditional agency mandates, the proposed solutions will likely require a horizontal policy approach built upon the collaboration of multiple agencies. And with the profound uncertainties inherent in trying to accurately predict the future, the value in foresight lies in increasing government’s capacity to adapt to new, complex challenges as they emerge.

Despite these challenges - and in responding to them - a focus on emerging, complex policy challenges has several benefits:

engaging for broad involvement: during a proposed Stage 1 of this exercise, the crowdsourcing ideation platform IdeaScale would be used to source and rank a long list of emerging, complex policy challenges. Contributors would be asked for a short title and description (e.g., “Rural Depopulation: small towns and remote regions throughout America are losing population to large cities and their suburbs. What do we do when a town has so few people left that its current governance arrangements are no longer reasonable?”). Other participants would then “upvote” or “downvote” the suggestion, and add commentary to further refine the problem definition. The moderator would combine similar proposals. Out of this long list, a short list of the top ten problems would emerge.
educating for collaborative agility: as with the first Policy Challenge, an important goal of the project is to have an impact on learning in the fields of public administration, policy studies and public affairs. During the proposed Stage 2 of The Next Policy Challenge, individuals and teams would collaborate on two-page short-form proposal that scopes one of the ten problems and sketches a strategy for addressing it. Rather than rely on traditional offline collaboration, the collaborative work in stages 2 and 3 would be facilitated through the GitHub platform, building on the possibilities of using GitHub to engage collaborative knowledge workers beyond the realm of open source software development. Stage 2 would start with 10 repositories (“repos”) being dropped in the GitHub NPC platform - essentially ten starting ideas that participants could “fork” into new repos. Working alone or in teams, these new repos would develop into short-form policy issues papers.
In each of the ten problem areas, two finalist “repos” would be selected as the basis for collaborative development of long-form proposal in Stage 3. The policy analysis skills involved in horizon planning and problem definition would be emphasized with participants, as would advanced skills in collaborative policy development. Regardless of whether an individual or team advanced to later stages, participants the use of GitHub would facilitated the continued involved in the process through all stages.
preparing for the unexpected: The long-form proposal Stage would again culminate in a finale event where a best proposal for each of the ten policy areas would be selected from the finalist teams. This winning team would present their proposals to federal agency representatives and expert judges in a finale event. By bringing a focused, horizon-scanning effort to a crowdsourced list of emerging, complex policy challenges, The Next Policy Challenge will provide the federal government with cutting edge thinking and an important policy foresight capacity to help it prepare for the coming decades.

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Asks

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Partners

Critics

Players