The follow is a repost from the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program’s Quarterly Newsletter. Visit PSCR’s website for more information.
Crowdsourcing Solutions for Public Safety Communications
By Tammi Marcoullier, PSCR Prize Architect, Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing
“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Bill Joy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems
Companies and government agencies have used prize and challenge competitions to find solutions to tough problems for hundreds of years. As a form of crowdsourcing, prize competitions incentivize broad and diverse groups of people to contribute solutions to a problem. Examples of familiar and fantastic results include the invention of the canning process, accurately measuring longitude, the first transatlantic flight, and more recently, private space flight.
The U.S. government launched an umbrella prize program in September 2010 (www.challenge.gov) that has run more than 700 competitions with more than $230 million in prize money and other incentives; PSCR is now using this tool to improve public safety communications technology.
PSCR plans to leverage open innovation crowdsourcing activities over the next six years as part of their Innovation Accelerator program. This means that any person, team, entrepreneur, inventor, or company can participate. We are looking to broaden and diversify the pool of contributors to public safety’s most pressing technology issues. Where do you fit in? There are five key areas the prize team will focus on:
- Location-Based Services (LBS)
- Land Mobile Radio (LMR) to Long Term Evolution (LTE)
- Mission Critical Voice over Broadband
- Enhanced User Interfaces (UI)
- Public Safety Analytics
“In challenge competitions, you ask people to do the impossible, in a completely unreasonable amount of time.” - Dr. Alok Das, Air Force Research Lab
Some of the key attributes of prize-based crowdsourcing are:
- Prize challenges have clearly defined problems. They ask solvers to reach a goal, milestone, or other outcome. It is not about requirements -- participants can determine creative ways to solve the problem and reach a goal.
- Participation is open. You don’t need to qualify with credentials, connections, or industry experience.
- There is no required work once the prize has been awarded. Sometimes there are opportunities to continue, but generally there is no obligation, nor are there requirements about how winners must spend the prize money.
- These are challenges intended to spur leaps in innovation, which means executing this program on accelerated timelines. Some competitions will take place in 30-90 days, others over the course of a year, depending on complexity.
- Multiple winners are great! We aren’t looking for a “needle in a haystack” solution, we’re looking to build a haystack of needles. The more viable and feasible options exist, the better the chances of transitioning the winning solutions into marketplace products and solutions.
We are looking to collaborate in a multitude of ways, including working groups, judging opportunities, partners, and participants/solvers.
PSCR will post every competition on http://bit.ly/PSprizes, a program-specific page on Challenge.gov. The page includes a discussion board for questions and ideas, and when live, will include a full description of each competition and winner announcements. Email questions to PSprizes@nist.gov.
Tammi Marcoullier is the Prize Architect, Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing for PSCR. Headquartered at U.S. Department of Commerce laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, the PSCR program is a joint effort between NIST/CTL and NTIA/ITS.
