If the goal is truly to allow the monitoring of expenditures and use of funds, then the first issue which should be addressed is the effectiveness of the data you capture. Reveal, and the rest of the Neighborhood America offering, is built on the Microsoft technology stack. It enables organizations to invite their constituents to not only share new ideas, but also help determine which ones are the best. Reveal is ideally suited for government entities that seek new ideas for innovation.
Through an online community offering ratings and rankings, members are empowered to bring the best ideas to the top, so that decision-makers can focus on those ideas that show the most potential for success – eliminating the time-consuming task of filtering through volumes of suggestions to determine which are useful.
Why is it important?
The following ideas are all included as core components of Neighborhood America’s solution.
Structure
Collecting ideas is only part of the equation. 10,000 ideas collected on change.gov showed people were willing to participate – but it also showed an inability to manage the data or present it in a useful format to either the citizens or the agency trying to listen to the feedback. The content was daunting and disorganized.
Visual content
Governments may be accustomed to text-heavy reports, but citizens are not. Exchanges that rely solely on text oftentimes are not compelling enough to capture attention or inspire involvement. Visually stimulating data is always more relevant and appealing to the average citizen.
Transparency vs. Moderation
Transparency is great, but moderation is a must. The same rules and checkpoints that are used in a traditional town hall meeting must be applied to the Web.
Wouldn’t the government ensure that a special interest group could not hijack the conversation at a town hall meeting – and have a plan of action in place that would have that person removed immediately?
Yet that wasn’t the case when special interest groups flooded WhiteHouse.gov and pushed their agenda for legalizing marijuana to the top of the ‘best ideas’ pool. The activity immediately damaged credibility – among citizens and the media – for what the White House was trying to accomplish.
Management Efficiencies
A trademark of the Obama administration is a renewed focus on transparency, collaboration and citizen involvement. The need to deploy multiple social media initiatives will exponentially grow over the coming years. How will you manage it all? To support this in the most efficient manner, you must be able to efficiently manage all of the citizen data – even across multiple agencies – from a single portal to ensure consistency and ease of administration, analytics and reporting.
