Gov 2 Expo – Citizen Engagement Rocking Out

Dan Munz of GSA and Peter Levin VA CTO talking about citizen engagement…

Some key take aways
-Citizen engagement is about making GOVERNMENT WORK BETTER…Not about cool tech, cool ideas.
-GSA has lots of upcoming items including challenge platform, citizen engagement platform, and Fedspace coming up.

VA is serious about engagement
-300,000 employees in VA, 50,000 in VBA
-Veterans Benefits Admin – Asked employees and got 7,000 paricipants, 3,000 ideas, and 10 ideas chosen and projects currently in implementation
-Did it again with VHA Innovation Inititiative – 45,000 participants, 6,500 ideas, 50,000 votes cast, 26 ideas chosen, winners were notified on May 7th. Implementation coming soon. For example, why don’t we do better longitutinal studies with data from Vista electronic records.
-Those numbers and engagement is amazing…fantastic percentage and engagement.
-Got 50,000 advocates wanting to do better
-Truly want to engage with their constitutents – the soldiers – who use social media.

-VA Innovation Initiative – this is the grander scheme. Asking citizens for feedback.
-Institutionalize innovation
-Create public-private partnership – Iterative and ongoing process
-Focus on the Secretary’s call for transformation

Challenges and opportunities
-Large resistance to getting started – and the enthusiasm once we did.
-The uncertainty about the color of money – working with boundaries rather than with in them. Where hosted, who paying for it…
-Employees want to hear from us – they have a ton of materials we can use
-Being really specific, being really vague – comfort in the ambiguity

Questions you should think about?
-Who gets to submit ideas?
-Who gets to comment?
-Who gets to vote?
-Who gets to choose?
-How will the choices be made? Will it withstand the Washington Post test?