Advances in communication technology can be combined with modern organizational principles to devise a new model for citizen organizing and advocacy that is more effective. Using these principles, we can create sustainable, grassroots culture change that is driven not by “experts” working at a distance from the actual problem, but instead by the passion of the members and the individuals that stand to benefit most from the change. We can connect members to one another and build powerful networks that will share lessons learned between geographically distant regions. We can empower members by giving them first the inspiration, and second the knowledge to implement change in their own families, towns, and regions. Blossoming from this, the members will have the capacity to develop practical and broadly-accepted solutions to age-old problems, and then successfully advocate for these solutions and for themselves on local, state, national, and global levels.

Background

I founded the Open Forum Foundation five years ago to solve the disconnect between citizens and government. In my DC-neophyte idealism, I believed that technology was the solution. After all, if we could video chat with people in India, why couldn’t we get a message to Capitol Hill? We built a communication tool that was meant to raise the level of respect in political conversations and create meaningful discussions between elected officials and their constituents. Unfortunately, this was a failure. Our analysis revealed that citizens are in what we called the “cathartic” phase of citizen engagement – they just want to “tell those idiots why they’re wrong!!”

This led to the next few years of the Foundation’s work: changing the culture of government to be less fearful – and even appreciative of citizen input. I’ve spent this time testing and honing experiential techniques that give government employees a positive experience of collaborating with one another and with people from outside of government. I have come to realize that while this sort of change is slow (sometimes painfully slow!), it is also sustainable – something that I can not say for any of the ‘Big Bang’ ideas I’ve seen tried here in DC.

Now, I would like to start working on what I see as the third and final piece of the puzzle that is connecting citizens and governments: getting citizens to believe they can make a difference and to understand how to engage in meaningful and productive ways.

Realizations

I have been researching and pondering this problem for well over a year. My first realization was that the entire lawmaking system today is designed to fight over which perspective is correct. This is particularly true for advocacy groups, which increase their membership and funding base by pushing a particular perspective – not by compromising or by devising broadly-acceptable solutions.

The second realization was that despite the prolific use of the word “grassroots” in advocacy circles, the majority of these groups are top-down and expert-driven, the term “membership” means individuals that donate money and/or join an email list, and the extent of the “members”’ participation is usually forwarding an email to their elected official.

The third realization came from investigation into the Millennial generation, which is quickly becoming the dominant voting block in the country. As discussed in Millennial Makeover by Winograd and Hais, this generation prefers to work together to solve problems – and if history is any guide, are going to bring about a significant change in the American political system.

The final piece that tempted my imagination and led me to the proposal that I am making here comes from the work of Harvard Researcher Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy. While my former Board President refers to this book as, “the most depressing book I’ve ever read,” I managed to find inspiration within it. Specifically, it discusses how membership organizations in the 1800s (Masons, Odd Fellows, Grange Halls, etc.) were also training grounds for democracy. Members were expected to fulfill serious responsibilities including holding office, participating in elections, and engaging in deliberation over relevant issues. Any advocacy positions that these organizations took were developed at the local level, approved at the state level, and adopted at the national level. This required these positions to have built broad, cross-class support nationally from the diverse membership of the organization. Unfortunately, these groups largely died in the 1960s because they were segregated by race or gender (not a cool thing to be in the middle of the civil rights movement!), resulting in the thte title of the book and the current state of our country today: diminished democracy.

Add this all together and you get a very large, very important, and very difficult problem that I am committed to solving:

The Problem

How to develop a membership-based, grassroots-driven organizational model that leverages modern communication technology to empower citizens to a) connect with one another, b) practice democracy through deliberation, solution co-creation, and coalition building, and c) make change in the world around them?

I’m not going to pretend that I have it solved, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got a line on it. I will warn you, it’s a bit complex. I’ve tried to lay it out as simply as possible, but 1) it requires a different perspective on what an organization does and 2) the devil IS in the details. This is just a skeleton, and the process of fleshing it out will vary from organization to organization, issue to issue. Please have a read and let me know what you think.

The Guiding Principle

You may ask yourself, how can technology and a new organizational model accomplish all of the things promised above? Why, by magic of course! Not stage magic, and not the kind with wizards and wands, but rather the kind that creates unexpected and marvelous results. When planning how to implement the responsibilities that are laid out in the next section, the guiding principle for implementing this new organizational model is to:

>> Make room for the magic to happen. <<

If you direct your members to do things, generally speaking, they will. If you give them explicit instructions on how to act, who to contact, and how to be successful, they will relinquish their creativity, their passion, and their ideas and follow your direction (assuming that you have their trust). However, if you want your members to be creative, passionate, and innovative – in other words, to create magic – you have to provide them with a vision they are passionate about and empower them to move towards it.

Organizational Responsibilities

The organization in this model is a neutral convener. Instead of leading its members, it is led by them. The organization develops and maintains the vision, handles the administrative duties, provides online technology to connect its members to one another and facilitate information- sharing, and provides multi-perspective educational resources on the issue.

Common Vision

Historically in civil society, organizations are held together by commonalities such as gender, race, class, common occupation, or common perspective on an issue. An organization working under this new model is not held together by any of these things, but rather by a common vision that captures the members’ concern for resolving a specific issue. This vision must be broad enough to include a majority of the perspectives on the issue, but narrow enough to appeal to people that are passionate about that issue. A vision that falls within this sweet spot will attract members from different races, classes, genders, and perspectives, creating a diverse membership with a common concern and a diverse array of channels through which to implement and create change.

It is the organization’s responsibility to establish and maintain the common vision that will attract members and keep them engaged with the organization. The wording of the vision is very important because it determines who will be attracted to the organization and who will not. The vision must appeal to the passions of the desired members. The vision drives the activities of the organization and its members. It is not something that is written down and forgotten about, but is instead the living raison d’être for the organization.

Empowering Members

Accomplishing this is not easy but doing so is the crux of how the organization moves from being a leader of its members to being led by its members. Luckily, there a number of reasons why an organization would want to do that.

Benefits

An organization that is structurally designed to empower its members can expect increased understanding of its beneficiaries, innovation, sustainable culture change, and faster success. If the vision is to empower a target group, it’s even better!

• Understanding.
  The first is a legitimate connection to the intended beneficiaries of the organization’s activities. Large, hierarchical organizations struggle to maintain an understanding of the real situation “in the field.” Empowering the members ensures that a grassroots-generated perspective guides the organization.
• Innovation.
  The horizontal structure of this new organizing model is deliberately designed to trust the members while empowering them to make their own decisions and work towards their own goals. This creates an innovative, adaptable, and flexible organization.
• Sustainable Culture Change.
  The most likely method for creating sustainable culture change is by empowering local actors to implement measures that are founded in local cultural knowledge. If these local actors have access to information from external experts and people who have succeeded (or failed) in similar circumstances, they are able to leverage that knowledge, apply it to their own situation, and accomplish even more with fewer false starts.
• Faster Success.
  Since the organization is an information-sharing network connected by technology, the members are collectively able to act in many places and in many ways simultaneously. There will be both successes and failures that occur, and all of these must be reported, thus enabling the members to learn from each other’s mistakes and find the edges of success more quickly. On top of this, the organization can use experts to analyze the volumes of available data and highlight the most important lessons drawn from the network’s efforts.
• Empowerment Empowers.
  Finally, empowering members works particularly well for issues in which the goal is to empower the beneficiaries because it models the exact change that the organization is striving to bring to fruition within the surrounding society. For example, if the organization’s mission is to empower women, what better way to do that than by empowering women?

Rules of Engagement

In order to be empowered, the members need a simple and clear set of rules on how to engage with the organization to enable them to focus their attention on finding better ways of accomplishing the vision. These rules should include guidelines on how to hold local meetings, share the results of local activities, and participate in organizational decision-making. The organizational decision-making process needs to be easily understandable, transparent in its functioning, and based on in-person group meetings where the members will come to consensus on organizational proposals. These proposals may be created by the organization itself or by any local group and will take the form of requests that the members make of the organization (eg fund this activity, research this topic, or advocate for this solution). There will be an automated model for reaching organizational consensus amongst local groups, and when this happens, it becomes the responsibility of the organization to abide by, or implement the decision.

Online Connecting Technology

The organization will provide Internet-based technology to enable members to connect to each other and learn both from each other as well as from more traditional educational and informational resources.

• Information-Sharing System and Social Network
  Every local group activity should be reported through the online connecting technology – whether it was a success or a failure. Members should be encouraged to be honest about their activities so that others can leverage earlier experiences and lessons as they plan their own activities. Underlying this functionality should be a basic social network that allows members to have personal profiles so as to get to know one another and connect via public or private discussions.

• Educational and Informational Resources
  In addition to the documentation of local activities within the information-sharing system, the organization should also provide educational and informational resources produced by issue experts. As information is only useful to an individual or group at the time when it can be applied, these resource must be widely disseminated and easily available; with members made aware of the types of information available and how to access it. Experts and researchers can also be engaged to analyse member activities in order to highlight successes, learn from failures, and expand the organizational knowledge base.

Online and Offline Engagement

All of these responsibilities need to be built so that they operate both online and offline. While it is understandable that access to information will be faster if a member has Internet access, this should not be a requirement for full participation in the organization. In fact, the organization should provide a full suite of services to ensure that offline members are also empowered. This should include a regular event (at least annually) for members to come together and meet in person and provision for local groups to hold meetings, perform activities, request relevant information, and submit reports via mail or phone (this information should then be captured online by the organization’s staff so that all may benefit from it).

Funding

Finally, the organization should be responsible for funding itself through grants or member contributions and may also provide funding opportunities for local activities. The details of how an organization will accomplish this will depend upon the organization’s structure, its intended beneficiaries, and many other factors.

Member Expectations

In contrast with the current expectations placed on members of most advocacy organizations, the members of this organization will be expected to engage in meaningful ways beyond paying member dues or perusing an intermittent mass-mail update to the membership base. In the context of this organization, it may even make sense to have an application process for people to become members that includes the requirement that a current member sponsor their application. This would help to build the social network while keeping the trust factor high within the organization. A list of member responsibilities would look something like this:

1. Attend and participate in local meetings.
2. Educate themselves on the topics to be discussed at meetings.
3. Understand how the organization works, including:
   1. the deliberative process for decision-making,
   2. how to leverage available resources,
   3. how to connect with the broader social network.
4. Report on any relevant activities that they are involved in.

The Technology

While the goal is to downplay the technology as a mere tool that empowers offline activities, it is nonetheless important to get it right. Following is a draft listing of the feature set that the organization’s technology would have to provide:

1. Online social networking, including
   1. Personal profiles
   2. Groups
      1. These would most likely be geographically based and each local group that forms would have an online space to post information and report their activities, but there may be reason to create other types of groups as well, eg sub-issue specific discussion groups that require broad geographic distribution in order to have enough people to work on the issue.
      2. Group reporting: the online group should provide all of the information and reporting forms that a local group needs to conduct meetings and report on their outcomes and local activities.
         1. These reports should be tagged to be easily searchable across the entire information-sharing system.
   3. Public and private communication mechanisms for broad sharing of information as well as personal and private interactions.
2. Information-sharing system (aka knowledge management), including:
   1. Expert-created educational and informational resources.
   2. Database of member activities and experiences and their results.
   3. This should be a flexible system, but at a minimum should require some level of categorization or tagging to enable content to be found by other members that may benefit from it
   4. REALLY GOOD SEARCH!!
3. A consensus-based decision-making mechanism that engages members in the functioning of the organization. Please note that this model is intentionally generic as the needs of each organization and their surrounding community will require a unique model to be developed.
   1. The organization or member groups may make proposals. The originating group retains authorship of the proposal.
   2. Other members may submit comments and suggestions for how to change the proposal.
   3. Discussion ensues around the comments and suggestions.
   4. With resolution of each discussion thread, the author changes the original document.
   5. Once a proposal reaches a certain stage of maturity, a deadline is made by which consensus must be reached. The deadline acts as a forcing function to achieve consensus, with the penalty being the defeat of the proposal.
      1. It is possible that the deadline should be associated with a regular in-person meeting that all members would be invited to.

Implementation Plan with a specific organization

This is a draft outline, intended to act as a starting place for the discussion.

1. Fundamentals
   1. Determine organizational vision
   2. Define interactions between organization, member groups, and members, including
      1. Deliberative model for managing organization
      2. Reporting model for local activities
2. Technology
   1. Develop full specs for technology
   2. Implement the technology
3. Content entered on website
   1. Organizational vision and interaction rules
   2. Educational resources, which may include:
      1. providing access to multiple perspectives on an issue (eg, not just resources developed by the organization, but the best resources out there from different perspectives)
      2. separating facts from opinions
4. Implementation
   1. Convert existing members to the new model
      1. online groups and offline groups
      2. start slow with nearby groups to work out the bugs, expand to the entire pre-existing membership of the organization.
         1. If people don’t want to convert, hold on to them as potential donors. It will take some time to separate these lists.
   2. Define pre-existing communities that the organization has not connected with (eg, other perspectives?) and conduct outreach to those groups.
   3. Focus on improving the system, educating, and empowering members. They will become the organization’s driving force, bringing in new members, ideas, donors, etc…

Responsibility breakdown

1. Open Forum Foundation
   1. Support organization in seeing the benefits of the change.
   2. In conjunction with the implementing organization, develop a culture change plan for the organization, its current employees, researchers, donors, and members.
   3. Support the organization in developing an appropriate vision and interaction rules.
   4. Define the technical specs for the required technology.
   5. Implement the technology.
   6. Support the organization through the change.
   7. Check back at 3 mo, 6 mo, 1 yr, 2 yr time frames.
2. Implementing organization
   1. Work with Open Forum on developing a culture change plan for the organization, its current employees, researchers, donors, and members.
   2. Take primary responsibility for developing an appropriate vision and rules of engagement.
   3. Manage the conversion to the new model, including converting its current members and doing outreach to new communities.
   4. Develop initial educational and informational resources. These may be gathered or created as is appropriate but most likely should be drawn from a broader perspective than just material created by the organization previously.
   5. Take over full responsibility for managing the new model.

Current Status

We think it’s only fair to acknowledge that while this model is based on a whole lot of research and similar experiences (most of them successful!), it has not yet been implemented. It represents a dramatic leap into the future of advocacy, but one which we believe is already on its way – we just want to help move it along!

We are completely aware that:

• This is only a starting place. It will get tweaked when it meets reality.
• The details of implementation will vary significantly for each of the issue-based organizational partners that we work with.
• We are looking for funding to support the organizational transformation for the first organizational partners and to develop the software (open source, of course!) that will manage the new model. If we can prove its viability, then it will take on a life of its own.
• We are actively seeking partners right now. In addition to doing domestic outreach, we’re talking to a women’s group in Nepal and investigating some options in India. Advocacy is global. Finding an organizational partner with the right mindset is more important than their physical location.

Under each heading, there is a generic search term that can be used to search for other tools that will work in your country or region, and then some examples of tools to consider. Most of these are free or at least have a free version that should work for a small event or when you’re just starting.

Feel free to share your favorites in the comments.

Growing Community

Search Term: Social Network

• Already existing networks:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • VKontacte
• Build your own network:
  • Ning
  • BuddyPress

Streaming audio

Search Term: broadcast online radio

•  Blogtalkradio

Note: These tools also archive the streamed audio. If you are searching for a new tool, this will most likely be an important feature to look for so that your community can listen to the audio at a later time.

Streaming Video

Search Term: streaming video

• UStream
• LiveStream

Note: These tools also archive the streamed video. If you are searching for a new tool, this will most likely be an important feature to look for so that your community can watch the video at a later time.

Screen Sharing

Search Term: screen sharing

• Join.me

Conference Calling

Search term: conference call

• MaestroConference.com
• Freeconferencecall.com

Real-time chat

Search term: text chat

• Public chat tools
  • Twitter – specify a hashtag, eg #techcamp
• Included in these other tools, mentioned above (best to use what they provide if you’re using the other tool so that you don’t spread your audience among too many tools):
  • LiveStream
  • UStream
  • Blogtalkradio
  • Functionality can be added to BuddyPress
• If your audience is super geeky (developers mostly):
  • IRC channel

Discussions

Search Term: discussion forum, threaded comment system

• There are plenty of open source tools that can be used for discussion forums but these require you to host the tools yourself. If you are just trying to build discussion around a topic, and you can lead that discussion with regular input, consider using blogging software such as WordPress.com or building on one of the social networks mentioned above.

Note: usually this functionality is part of a larger tool and rarely stand-alone. If using commenting functionality for discussion, look for threaded comments. This means that people can respond to individual comments and thus draw out the discussion instead of just responding to the original post.

Attaching or Linking to Documents

Search Terms: document sharing

• For viewing online:
  • Scribd.com
  • Google Docs
• For download:
  • DropBox
  • Ubuntu One
  • SkyDrive (Microsoft)
  • If you have your own website, you can upload the document there, and then provide a link for others to download it

Note: these tools allow you to provide additional documents for dissemination. Some of these tools will allow the documents to be read online, if you are self-hosting the documents, your users will have to download it to their computer to view it. Generally speaking, it is better to present information in a web-friendly format (eg on a web page, in a blog post, on Facebook, etc..) where possible. More people will then see it. Obviously, this is not always appropriate depending upon the document.

Accessibility for Disabled People

Search Terms: “508 compliance”

Note: Section 508 is part of US law that requires all US government to be available for disabled people. Accomplishing this is not so much using a specific tool, as it is knowing how to do it.

Video chat

Search terms: video chat

• Google Hangouts within google +
• Skype

Note: this is an evolving field with many smaller players coming and going.

Online Ticketing

Search terms: online ticketing

• Eventbrite
• TicketLeap

Planning/Outlining

Search terms: task management, online outliner

• Planfix.ru
• Checkvist.com

Scheduling Meetings

Search terms: meeting scheduling

• Doodle.com

Note: This tool helps you to figure out when people are available to meet.

First, I discovered that hackpad has gone a ways past etherpad and created something unique and useful in new ways. They were kind enough to provide a unique url for our event (http://ossdc.hackpad.com/), where you can see what we did – and follow along if you’d like. This main hackpad was the central point for participant information during the event, so we didn’t need to print anything, and it also enabled us to do several fun and innovative things with the format.

The Format

The event was a combination of amazing speakers and “Deep Discussion” break out sessions designed to ensure that participants walked away with tangibly useful information that they could put to work directly when they got back to the office. Here is a brief overview of the agenda items, with areas delineated that hackpad made possible:

• Introduction
• Keynote speaker
• Structured networking
• HACKPAD! During the intro and keynote speaker, participants added their topics of interest into the schedule, each next to a number that corresponded to numbers on the wall around the room. During this period, they were welcome to wander from one number (topic) to the next and meet other people that had the same interests.
• Speakers – there were 3 periods where a group of 4 or 5 speakers each gave a 6 minute talk.
• Deep Discussions
• HACKPAD! Each speaker was assigned a room and time slot following their speech. In addition, participants could suggest other topics for discussion if they preferred. All of this information was captured in hackpad and changed live and in real time by the participants and the organizers. The discussions were engaging and even the speakers said that they had learned things during the event.
• Everything Else
• HACKPAD! This section of the event was closest to a traditional unconference except that we didn’t create a paper board – we used hackpad! The entire agenda for this afternoon’s discussions were proposed by participants. Each was responsible for adding their content into the hackpad, and then making a public (short) announcement to the rest of the group about their topic. Once this was done, they all headed off to engage in serious and intense conversations about a diversity of topics.
• Information collecting
• HACKPAD! In addition, the hackpad was used for collecting notes that were collaboratively created by the participants during the event, as well as crowdsourcing lists of relevant communities and resources that other participants should know about.

All in all, hackpad made the process very easy and we had no difficulties with the technology. While we only had about 70 people editing simultaneously, hackpad allows up to 150. This ensured that no one ever got locked out. In addition, the real time nature of adding information during a live event allowed us to create a virtual unconference board that all participants had immediate access to through their computers, smartphones, and ipads.

Lessons Learned

1. Very few people took advantage of the ability to schedule a session at the same time as the speakers were doing sessions. While this was useful for those that did, there simply wasn’t enough energy around the possibility of doing so for people to really leverage the opportunity. I think one solution for this is to allow session proposers to announce their sessions to the assembled crowd.
2. A potential danger with allowing anyone to propose sessions during speaker sessions is keeping them topical. Perhaps this means that proposed sessions during this time need to be approved by the facilitator – just a thought.
3. If you don’t have a physical unconference board, you still need to get people up and moving around to announce their sessions. Without this, you don’t generate the excitement and comfort level in the room that enables anyone to take ownership of the event and ask the questions they really need answers to.
4. For a full unconference, this could work very well with the virtual unconference board (hackpad) projected on the wall as people announce their sessions.
5. Finally, people who show up without the appropriate technology (smartphone – not all of which work perfectly, iPad, or laptop) need a means to add sessions and see what else has been proposed. Projecting the hackpad on the wall is one way to do this, but it would be useful to have a couple of free computers/people who are willing to help the less-tech savvy propose sessions and see what is on the live schedule (on hackpad).

All in all, some really successful and exciting stuff. If you haven’t, check out their Hackpad Feature Help page to see some of the cool functionality they’ve added in.

Oh yeah! I suppose it bears mentioning that this is a free product, with a professional version (that I don’t think is out yet) for private and corporate use.

My hope is that this leads to more work like this. So much good in such a short period time, all led with a locals-know-best-but-international-experts-have-a-lot-of-good-advice-to-share mentality.

Good stuff.

• Moldova’s eTransformation blog and Community of Open Data Development
• EPSIplatform for Europe
• GovLoop for the US and OpenGov communities

I expect a few more to come online and will update this post as that happens.

In traditional terms, this hackathon could be described as more of a code sprint for the final three days of a prize challenge, but even that description understates the innovation and complexity of the event format. In addition, it doesn’t do justice to all of the accomplishments that were achieved by the organizers as well as the participants.

Background

Moldova is a small country in Eastern Europe, between Romania and Ukraine. It is one of the poorest countries in Europe, and is striving to begin the process of joining the EU. It is also the recipient of a $20 million line of credit from the World Bank to fund its e-government efforts, as led by the e-Government Center (an official part of the Moldovan government). Moldova has an active developer community, but they are only beginning to connect with civil society and government. The country also just joined the Open Government Partnership, and has approved a National Action Plan that commits the government to self-improvement in multiple areas, one of which is the release of government data on the Moldovan Data Portal.

This hackathon, called the Open Innovation Challenge “Apps for Moldova,” was the culmination of Innovation Week, which was designed to engage the private sector and civil society in the launch of this National Action Plan. Putting on this event was truly a multi-lateral effort, including the e-Government Center and the World Bank along with local non-profits, developer organizations, and private sector companies.

The Format

The desires to (a) develop a civic hacker community and (b) create public usage of government data in order to ensure the sustainability of Moldova’s open government efforts led to the unique format of this three day hackathon.

Prizes

Prizes were awarded to teams in part based on the perceived sustainability of the app and the implementation plan. The prizes were provided by the e-Government Center, MoldCell, Endava, and Fusionworks (local companies) and while some were traditional give-aways (iPads, 3G modems, relevant books…), most were truly innovative and designed to encourage the long-term sustainability of the projects and the developers. These included:

• $5000 service delivery contracts with the government of Moldova for completion of the app.
• Employment and internship opportunities with some of the biggest companies in the country.
• Workspace including all of the required office amenities.

To encourage teams to form early and come prepared, there was a submission deadline to compete for these prizes that was 8 days prior to the beginning of the event.

TechCamp

Day one of the actual event began with a half day TechCamp that brought international experts from Africa, Europe, and North and South America to educate the participants on the value and skills necessary to create great apps that leverage government data (for a complete list of who attended, see here).

The morning began with a series of very short speeches from the organizers and prize presenters and quickly moved into presentations that would tangibly benefit all participants. This included overviews of what is happening in other parts of the world, the potential benefit to Moldova of the work they are about to embark upon, and practical advise on how to win the hackathon.

At this point, all participants were split into 10 groups, each of which speed-geeked their way through 10 different presenters who provided them with additional informational overviews on topics that may benefit them during the weekend. This included data vizualization, mapping, crowd sourcing, data scraping, and how to access government data. In addition, this introduced all of the participants to many of the international experts that were available to assist them over the weekend.

The TechCamp closed with an opportunity for the participants to return to the presenter that they most wanted to learn from and spend a half hour diving deeper into the topic. Everyone went to a networking lunch at which the experts mingled amongst the participants to further discuss relevant concepts and begin to form working relationships.

Code Sprint

While teams had to submit proposals early in order to be eligible for the prizes, developers were invited to attend and join in the activities even if they didn’t yet have a team. In addition, people were encouraged to come up with new ideas during the course of the TechCamp, and information was provided to them about unrelated prize competitions that they may be able to enter.

In order to let everyone know the diversity of work that was occurring and to connect teams with needs to available developers, the code sprint began with a series of 1 minute presentations by each team of all 26 submitted applications. Following on this, new ideas were presented. While some teams did not ask for additional help, most did and these were given a number and distributed around the room so that all of the free developers could talk to them and determine which team they would like to work with.

Once the teams were established, everyone was given free run of the space and spread out to get to work. The experts began circulating between individual teams to provide advice and assistance and determine what needs they may have. The organizers of the event turned their attention to fulfilling these needs. In two projects, required government data that was not yet available was released in the open data portal based upon requests from the developers during the course of the weekend.

As I said before, this was truly a multi-lateral effort which gave the developers the sense that they sit at a critical point for the future of Moldova and that their effective engagement can make a significant difference in the future of their country.

Judging and Awards

2pm on Sunday was the deadline for all work to be completed. Teams had to upload two screenshots and a paragraph explanation to http://appsformoldova.tumblr.com/ and also give a five minute presentation to all participants. During these presentations, each team was awarded with Certificates of Participation and flash drives. The judges also began their scoring.

Following the presentations, each team set up a laptop for the apps showcase, thus enabling all participants (and judges) to see firsthand how the apps work ask additional questions.

The event finished with a formal awards ceremony and a celebratory networking reception.

The Results

As with any hackathon, the most exciting outcomes from this event are the apps that were created during it. A full list of the developed apps is available at http://appsformoldova.tumblr.com/ but the winners of the government-sponsored prizes were Social Tools, OpenMed, MoldBizPedia, and E-Ticket. Here is a quick overview and screenshot of each app.

Social Tools is an API for the Government Data Portal. It provides easy to use widgets that present data from the portal.

OpenMed is a website that offers information, ratings, locations, and financial information about hospitals and doctors. It is intended to make it easier for people to find appropriate medical care.

MoldBizPedia is a data portal for everything about doing business in Moldova. It intends to combine government information with private sector information to be a one-stop-shop for anyone running, or considering starting a business in Moldova and will provide information on the necessities such as regulations, laws, and financing as well as providing the opportunity to find business partners and get advice from others.

E-Ticket is an online ticketing system for the broad diversity of cultural and theatrical events that occur within Moldova. This is built on information from the Ministry of Culture and by making this information publicly available and easily accessible will serve to enhance tourism in Moldova.

Beyond the apps however, there are several additional levels at which the results of this event may be judged — and from my perspective, it would appear that it was a success on all of them.

Globally speaking, significant advice was drawn on from all over the world to educate and inform this young civic hacker community. The participants seemed to gain a great deal from these interactions — as did the experts. In addition, while the follow-up analysis is just beginning, one goal for this event was to provide a case study for other countries to learn from. So much worked correctly in Moldova, but there are also lessons that can be drawn from this experience to improve on it for next time. Look for more posts on this topic over the next month as this analysis continues.

For Moldova, significant progress was made in terms of both encouraging use of government data from the Moldovan Data Portal and laying the groundwork for a civic hacker community. Admittedly, there is still much to be done to fully achieve both of these goals, but a solid foundation has been laid. Furthermore, several of the teams are on track to become self-sustaining as small businesses, thus supporting economic development in the country.

An unexpected benefit from this event was an upsurge in the release of data to the portal by Ministries of the government. While I don’t have enough evidence to prove that this was the cause of the sudden release of numerous additional datasets, release of datasets had stagnated until the event drew near.

Finally, given all of the above success and the fact that everyone involved – the experts, the organizers, and the participants all had a great time, it is very likely that this is only the first of many “hackathons” in Moldova. This fact will most likely go the farthest towards creating sustainable use of government data and a vibrant civic hacker community.

If you’ve experienced something innovative at a hackathon, let us know about it in the comments below.

More Information

If you’d like to know more about how to put on one of these events in your own community or country, feel free to reach out. I’m easy to find at wayne@open4m.org or on Twitter or LinkedIn as wmburke.

http://blog.opengovpartnership.org/2012/05/what-can-you-learn-from-moldovas-nap-launch/

We set up a US version of the site at http://opengovpartners.org/us and have already received requests from a couple of other countries for sites (we’ll not talk about who they are until they get their sites populated with content and ready to take live).