Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

7.20.10 | Under the leadership of Dash and fellow tech guru Gina Trapani, Expert Labs is developing an open-source tool to help government more easily solicit input and sift through those ideas submitted via email and existing social networks like Facebook, as well as by mail and fax.

Expert Labs is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Its inaugural project, the Grand Challenges initiative, helped the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy identify the biggest future challenges in science and technology.

Dash shares some of the results here, along with important lessons he’s learned from new media—including an essential point for educators: Everyone has the power to shape policy and effect change.

Spotlight: Tell us what Expert Labs is and its goals. You’re tapping into the powers of crowdsourcing, correct?

Anil Dash: The mission at Expert Labs is to help policy makers make better decisions by tapping into the expertise through social networks. I think the term “crowdsourcing” can be a little bit vague these days—lots of people use the word without precisely defining what they’re doing. In our case, it’s valuable to connect to large numbers of people on social networks, but mostly in service of finding those few people who have really valuable or insightful or unexpected new ideas. So, if that fits the definition of “crowdsourcing,” than that’s definitely us.

Spotlight: What is the potential of crowdsourcing? How does being open to a social network of contributors help solve a lot of the stickiest problems?

AD: I think the simplest potential for crowdsourcing in a policy context is to include the few people that might otherwise be excluded from the conversation. Instead of a closed-door meeting with a few hand-picked experts, we can open up to experts who might not have the time, resources, connections or prominence to be invited to an ordinary briefing.

By opening up to a large network, we can open up to the potential for serendipity and inclusion and diversity of influences, all of which make for a much more fertile environment for new ideas to sprout up.

Spotlight: You recently completed the first attempt at crowdsourcing answers with the Grand Challenges initiative, in which the White House asked people what should be the next big problems to solve in science. How did that go?

AD: In supporting the Grand Challenges initiative, our goal was to radically increase the number of people who participated in the Request For Innovations. Though it’s just a first experiment, we’re very pleased with the rate of responses, where thousands of people have sent in their thoughts or ideas through existing social networks. And for almost all of them, they’d never been involved in a policy discussion before. Overall, we’d consider it a success, but of course there’s a lot more work to do in improving the analysis of the insights generated by all those responses.

Spotlight: I see one of the Grand Challenges examples used to get the conversation rolling was to create educational software that is as compelling as the best video game and as effective as a personal tutor, or to create an interactive digital library at the fingertips of every child. Did anyone build on that question or chime in with other challenges?

AD: There were some responses along those lines—I saw high school students who responded by saying they wished all their textbooks were replaced with digital textbooks that could be instantly updated. Maybe some of the motivation was just to lighten the amount of weight that they have to carry around, but there is absolutely a lot of awareness and excitement over the idea that we could radically improve the fundamental tools of education by making them a little more modern.

Spotlight: James Pinkerton, in the latest issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, argues that in order to hold their ground, Democrats “have to invent new user-friendly ways for citizens to access the government across the board.” Is Expert Labs a step in this direction? It isn’t exactly “access” as he meant it, but it is access in the sense that citizens are contributing. How is Expert Labs an important player in this quest?

AD: We do see ourselves at Expert Labs as part of improving access to government, particularly because we’re not part of the government ourselves. If citizens are going to be truly empowered to interact with government as a platform for success and advancement, we have to not rely on government agencies to do everything, but have to feel as if we have the power ourselves to organize and act without waiting for permission from Washington, D.C.

In that context, I think we at Expert Labs are at the very forefront of truly participatory democracy in some ways, because we want people who aren’t elected officials, who aren’t employed by the government, and who don’t have the privilege of access through traditional means of wealth and privilege, to be able to contribute to policy discussions simply by using tools and networks they’re already familiar with. That’s one of the most exciting parts of what we do.

Spotlight: Young people are notorious for their lack of civic participation. How do you get young people involved in this kind of project?

AD: I think the idea that young people don’t participate in civic good is false, and judging by the fact that young people actually participated in the Grand Challenges initiative themselves, we have counter-examples to the traditional cynicism about youth participation in civil society.

Every generation for a hundred thousand years has probably said, “These kids today just don’t care about society and governance!” And if our work can use networks to help make youth participation visible, I’ll be delighted.

Spotlight: You’re creating the platform for all this exchange, right? What does that look like? Isn’t the platform itself an open-source venture?

AD: We have led an open-source community in creating the technology that supports this entire conversation. The project is led by Gina Trapani, who is one of the most successful bloggers and podcasters in the world, famous for starting the blog Lifehacker and hosting the podcast “This Week in Google,” and she’s hugely respected in the open source world.

She’s been able to attract an amazing community of developers from all across the country and around the world who are making great contributions to our application. (Right now, the application is called ThinkTank, but that name will be changing shortly.)

And the community’s even earned the recognition of being picked by Google for their “Summer of Code” program, which sponsors students to work on open source projects—our being picked shows that this little platform is rapidly maturing, even though it’s really only been around for a few months.

Spotlight: People can tweet their answers or email to a question posed. They can retweet the request and spread the word. They can reply on the gov’s website. Then what happens? Why does this process work?

AD: Once a person has submitted their ideas to the White House, our goal is that those submissions are treated exactly the same, whether they came in via social network, email, fax, carrier pigeon or whatever.

Policy makers are used to sifting through ideas, so we’re trying to give them slightly more robust tools to do that filtering and sifting on their own, but fundamentally what makes it work is that policy makers have been looking for a way to get more people engaged in a conversation, and we’re just meeting that untapped need.

Spotlight: Expert Labs seeks to tap the huge public potential for creativity and innovation. Yet government is not always seen as the place where innovation happens. It’s too hidebound, not to mention political. How does ExpertLabs help spark innovation in public/private ventures?

AD: One of the biggest trends we’re tapping in to is that innovation increasingly is happening in government, even ahead of the private sector. For example, people need to use shorter web addresses these days to fit into the limitations of services like Twitter, which constrain messages to 140 characters.

As a result, a new class of tools called URL shorteners has popped up as a big area of innovation. But amazingly, the federal government (specifically the GSA) was able to launch a URL shortener at http://go.usa.gov/ two months before either Google or Facebook made theirs available.

So in this case, you have federal agencies adopting and deploying cutting-edge technology faster than even the most cutting-edge Silicon Valley innovators are able to. At Expert Labs, we’re just trying to tap into that new spirit of innovation, and then connect it to our relationships that we have with the Facebooks and Googles and Twitters of the world.

Spotlight: You must get a lot of chaff amid the wheat, so to speak. How do you cut through all the inane answers? Who determines what’s valuable, and how?

AD: There is of course some noise any time you get a lot of responses to any question. The goal isn’t to prevent that from happening, but rather to provide rich tools to empower policy makers to sort through it all.

So, for example, if a question is about science policy and a lot of responses are off-topic and talking about some unrelated social issue, we can provide a policy maker with a simple keyword filter to separate those responses into a different display.

Ultimately, the decision of which responses to use as inspiration is 100 percent in the hands of the policy makers. We’re not making a tool for mob rule—we’re making a platform for amplifying the efforts of policy makers who already want public feedback to improve their work.

[Dash spoke at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum about how government can use start-up style principles. Watch his talk, “Startup.gov: How Policy Makers Can Crowdsource Innovation,” below.]

Spotlight: Turning to education, which Spotlight focuses on, the economy has obliterated funding opportunities, and schools may have to turn to private-sector partners to innovate. How can the Expert Labs serve as a model for a hybrid public-private partnerships? That is, how can Expert Labs inspire people to experiment with educational reforms on a small scale and then start connecting them all together?

AD: We hope that one of the fundamental things our work can do is teach about best practices for building relationships with a large group of interested parties. One of the hardest things to do in supporting education is to make sure all of the stakeholders in a particular educational institution are able to stay up-to-date and connected to the teaching that is taking place. So, at a technology level, that’s what we hope to provide.

In terms of modeling a public-private partnership, what we hope to show by example is that different institutions can be sort of loosely coupled, but still be very effective in collaborating, Where a private corporation might balk at the usual constraints of interacting with a school, and a school might have concerns about the motivations or priorities of a private corporation, a lot of those areas of tension can be addressed by making it possible to be working towards similar goals without having to have a big committee or really constrained collaboration.

That’s exactly what we do in trying to support the White House or various agencies—we make a set of tools and best practices available that lets them succeed without having to be closely integrated with them, or without having to be part of the government at all.

Spotlight: What lessons do open government and technology initiatives like Expert Labs have for educators and students today? What relevance to civics or history teachers does Expert Labs offer about how technology is shaping our culture and relationship to government?

AD: The two biggest things I think educators and students can take away from Expert Labs are that first, it’s possible to be involved in the policies that impact all of our lives. These policies aren’t made by unfeeling robots, they’re made by people who deeply care about these issues, and who need our help to make the right choices.

Second, there is a bigger lesson here about empowerment—we are able to change things even if we’re not a billion-dollar company or a special interest with privileged access to the halls of power.

Ultimately, that’s the most important goal that technology can serve, to return us (or perhaps bring us for the first time) to the position of control and engagement that our founding documents had defined as the obligations of a citizen.

Spotlight: You were in the private sector prior to this latest gig. Places like Google and Apple have the market cornered on the cool factor. What can they teach politicians in that respect? What does Steve Jobs know about quality, user-friendliness and cool that politicians do not know but could apply?

AD: What all of the great technology successes of the past years have in common is a relentless focus on what they’d consider “customers,” or government would simply consider “citizens.” Whether it falls under the title of usability or user experience, or any of these other terms, it’s about ensuring a great, consistent, comprehensible experience that yields the expected results as efficiently as possible with maximum delight.

That idea of customer service or approachability would be the most important cultural learning I could hope to see filter from the tech industry into the world of government and policy. The truth is, I am much more focused on the people who do the actual work of governance than on the politicians.

Sure, there are always going to be candidates in shiny suits who talk smooth and are the big names in Washington, D.C. But the thousands of dedicated public servants who will never be rich or famous, who do the work because they believe in the mission of their agency, or because they just love their country or their job, could be much more effective in their work if they’re empowered with the same level of technology that a lot of us take for granted in managing our personal lives or in playing social games online.

That’s the base of government work that can really change the user-friendliness and “cool factor” of government and governance, in a way that the politicians never could.

Spotlight: What was your school experience when you were younger? How was it different than what kids experience today?

AD: While I had great teachers much of the time, and am very thankful for having gotten a great public school education, my overall experience in school was that it was very hard for the schools I went to to accommodate my focus on technology, and my self-paced learning style. We had “computer classes,” which seem anachronistic enough already, but that was made even worse by the fact that they considered typing to be a computer skill, instead of mastery of broader concepts of how technology could improve and impact our lives, and the lives of others.

When I talk to kids today, I’m delighted with how much more flexibility they often have in their education, even if it’s just outside of school instead of inside. Students who are really interested in a topic can look it up on Wikipedia, share information about it with their friends on a blog or on Facebook, watch YouTube videos on how to do something new.

I remember waiting weeks for an inter-library loan of a book about math puzzles when I was in junior high—that would all be at my fingertips in 30 seconds on my iPad today.

Most importantly, students today have a cultural context where they’re learning to put new technology and new learning trends into a social context. There’s more information available now than ever to show them how people in other cities, states and countries live, and to get them to think more broadly about the lessons they’re trying to learn. That makes me more excited and optimistic than ever about the future of education.

Spotlight: What was your craziest start-up experience? How does ExpertLabs compare?

AD: There’s too many stories to tell! I think one of my favorite moments was when I first started really working full-time on Six Apart, the blogging company where I was the first employee. The company was founded by a husband-and-wife couple, Ben and Mena Trott, who are now among my closest friends. At the time, though, we’d mostly only known each other online, and then we were thrown into this pressure cooker of trying to launch a startup while having really very little idea of what to do. It was especially awkward because at the time, the company was based in their home, since we hadn’t had time to find an office yet.

Long story short, while we were trying to officially announce the existence of the company and its first new web service, I was sleeping on the couch in their spare bedroom, which also doubled as the office where all of the development and business functions were taking place. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized they had surreptitiously taken a photo of me having fallen asleep (after we’d all been up for about four days straight) with my laptop still open, lying on the floor right in the middle of the world headquarters of our little company.

Today, the company has hundreds of employees around the world and millions of people who interact with the technology we created every day. But at the time, it was the sort of place where you might just end up curled up and asleep in the center of the erstwhile office. And needless to say, that photo of me asleep on the floor made an appearance years later when I was celebrating my 5-year anniversary with the company.

These days, I’m still trying to work just as a hard, but perhaps with a little more dignified surroundings. Expert Labs is very fortunate in that we have great resources from AAAS and from the MacArthur Foundation, so I at least have my own desk and chair now.

Photo by Merlin Mann.