Presentations from recent event "Online Competitions: Defining Success and Demonstrating Impact"

About a month ago, the KM Impact Challenge and the Society for International Development sponsored the  "Online Competitions: Defining Success and Demonstrating Impact" event. We heard three great presentations from The World Bank Institute, Ashoka's Changemakers,  and the U.S. General Services Administration,  who shared their insights and experiences with online competitions and challenges.

In her presentation, Gail Davenport from World Bank Institute gave an overview on how competitions and prizes have been present throughout history.  She explained the dynamics of some of their competition mechanisms such as the Development Marketplace that in addition to identifying winners has been building a community, and focused on sharing her experience and some of the challenges with the recent Apps for Development Competition.

On April of 2010, the World Bank open its data sets for free (previously available just for subscriptions, usually for academics).  Building on the experience from the DC government on DC Apps, they launch Apps for Development encouraging software developers to engage with the WB data to develop and App that relates with the MDGs.  "The Apps for Development Competition aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data."

View the screencast of Gail Davenport's presentation here.

Kris Herbst, Creative Manager and and Alexa Clay, Knowledge and Learning Manager of Ahoka's Changemakers focused their presentation more on the impact Changemakers has had throughout the years.  Changemakers was launched 12 years ago, and after 5 years they moved to a more engaging phase, applying more of an 'American Idol' metaphor for online competitions.  On their first online competition they received 100 entries, on their second competition entires where received from more than 30 countries and realized the great potential of opensourcing solutions.  One of the impacts for organizations resulted in reducing their 3-4 year call for proposals to 3 to 4 months.

Marketing and outreach has been very important for their online competitions success.  They currently have about 10,000 innovations with the participation of 90,000 members from 125 countries. More than 40 million has gone directly to fund social innovators. They have also been successful in generating a diverse and important group of partners that include: The Packard Foundation, The Gates Foundation, Nike, G20, IDB, National Geographic, among others.

For many social innovators, winning a Changemakers competition or being associated with the Changemakers label has helped bring more attention and support to their work, that otherwise they would have not been recognized for.

View the screencast of Kris Herbst and Alexa Clay's presentation here..


The event concluded with Daniel Munz presentation about Challege.gov website.  Challenge.gov was created to serve as a central online platform for prizes and challenges for different US government agencies. Their approach was to come up with and easy, clean, inviting design where user driven content is a must and makes the website. In Challenge.gov you can sort challenges by many ways, making it easy to discover challenges so that you can box yourself easily based on what you like.

They have provided powerful financial and social incentives so that they can build in from the network that has been generated around the challenges. An example is the ability to support a challenge even if you may not want to solve it. Since its recent launch, challenge.gov has 44 unique challenges offered by 22 agencies on different issues.  A total of 80,000 visitors, 3,200 + supporters, visits from 4,800 + cities in all 50 states and visits from 160 different countries.

The US government considers this platform as an efficient mechanism that enhances our democracy.  Some examples of their successful online challenges are: the USDA Apps for Healthy Kids,    How do I become President? Challenge with Kids.gov - to graphically explain the process of how to become a president. Among many others.

View the screencast of Daniel Munz's presentation here.