White House's online contests for feds have roots in Virginia

The White House has borrowed a strategy that one of its top technology executives employed while working for the commonwealth of Virginia, using online contests to motivate federal employees to submit ideas that improve government performance.

In 2007, Virginia officials, including Aneesh Chopra, then the commonwealth's secretary of technology, introduced a productivity investment fund that gave financial awards to Virginia workers who developed novel uses of technology that enhanced agency operations. Now that Chopra is serving as the federal government's first chief technology officer in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, the federal government is turning to online contests to solicit suggestions from employees for streamlining federal agency operations.

The White House launched a monthlong contest this fall asking federal employees for ways to cut government spending. The winner of the contest will meet President Obama and the budget-cutting idea will be included in the president's fiscal 2011 budget request. Federal employees submitted 38,484 ideas to slash federal spending. The White House used the online challenge idea to ask workers to submit and vote on ideas for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The contests have their roots in Virginia, where employees and members of the public, with support from the head of a sponsoring commonwealth agency, compete for money to deploy their proposals, which must lower operating costs and increase efficiencies. Initial projects included a Web-based system to simplify the Medicaid application process.

Virginia "worked to build a culture of innovation in the public sector that saw employees translating simple ideas into funded prototypes that aligned directly with legislative and executive priorities," Chopra said at his Senate confirmation hearing on May 19. "Our productivity investment fund channeled modest resources into 30-plus projects that will deliver 4-1 returns on taxpayer investment over three years."

But in a slow economy, all levels of government have trouble providing incentives to reward innovative employees, said Jane Kusiak, executive director of the Council on Virginia's Future, which serves as an advisory board to the governor and general assembly. "How do you selectively approach individuals who are really turning the curve to stay where they are?" she asked. "This is a major challenge for us. ... We do have a pay-for-performance plan. We can't afford it."

Kusiak explained Virginia's incentive program during a presentation on Monday at a Washington conference hosted by The Public Manager, a professional journal, and the American Society for Public Administration. The event, which focused on increasing trust in government, was open to local, state and federal administration personnel, as well as nonprofit managers and academics.

She told conference attendees about the council's online tool for holding government accountable, called Virginia Performs, a score card that assesses the commonwealth's progress in improving quality-of-life issues.

The public site measures trends in areas such as business climate (which is improving), immunization (also improving), juvenile arrests (maintaining), solid waste and recycling (maintaining), taxation (maintaining) and traffic congestion (worsening). The score cards also indicate whether Virginia's influence on a societal metric is "significant," as in the case of taxation, or "limited," as is the case for solid waste.

"It can be very boring for a citizen to listen to you about what a department does, how we spend our money ... unless you can relate it to them," Kusiak said. "It's about improving lives."