Jarah Meador, Director, Open Innovation Program 

2 minute read

The passage of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act in 2010 formalized the General Service Administration’s (GSA) role to support federally sponsored prize competitions and sparked the creation of Challenge.Gov. Over a decade later, and with roughly 1,300 prize competitions completed, the federal government continues to increase the use of prize competitions to engage the public to solve problems. Federal agencies have incorporated open innovation mechanisms into their sourcing strategies and their use of prize competitions has matured. Challenge.Gov is both a program and a platform and we have worked side by side with many of you to continue to evolve to support your needs.

Our team welcomed in fiscal year 2021 (FY21) and dubbed it “The Year of the Federal Practitioner”. Month after month, we conducted rounds of discovery to get to know you and your needs. We generated personas that allowed us to design and center capacity building activities for you, no matter your level of experience with prize competitions. You joined us for office hours, spotlight chats, deep dives, and discovery sprints. You showed up, shared, and supported each other’s good work. We learned from you and this helped us to refine the federal prize toolkit - to meet your needs. Together through these activities, we solidified the foundation of our community.

Simultaneously, throughout FY21 we worked with a team of web developers to build the infrastructure to support public engagement with your prize competitions and crowdsourcing activities. The new Challenge.Gov platform launched on October 13th and it would not have been possible without your help. Thanks to the many of you who served to inform the platform’s development. We met with you before we wrote a line of code to understand your vision. We continued to rely on you for user testing as we built your vision into the features of the new platform.

The Challenge.Gov platform is built on a foundation of some of the best shared services and technologies that the GSA has to offer. Login.gov, Cloud.gov, the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS), Cloud.gov pages, and Search.gov all work together to deliver a secure engagement portal at no financial cost to federal agencies. This custom portal allows public solvers to submit entries directly to challenges and federal employees can create and manage their competitions in one place. Challenge.Gov’s custom portal code is open and can be found here.

Now is your chance to engage with your new platform. Visit Challenge.Gov, create a challenge manager account, and explore the new features. We take your feedback seriously. Please send an email to team@challenge.gov to let us know what you see, how it works for you, and what you’d like to see next.

While FY21 was “The Year of the Federal Practitioner”, FY22 is already shaping up to be “The Year of the Public Solver”. With this new platform, challenge managers can directly engage the public in innovation and problem solving. Finally, we can focus on building external communities around our agencies and missions.

We look forward to navigating this prize competition maturity model in partnership with you. We hope you enjoy this issue of Federal Challenge Monthly. As always, if you have an idea for a future newsletter article please send us a note at team@challenge.gov. We also invite you to encourage others to sign up for this newsletter and join us on this open innovation journey.

 

---

Return to Federal Challenge Monthly