Last weekend I attended Minnesota Public Radio’s Top Coast Festival, a conference on politics, pop culture, health care, technology, food and philanthropy. There were two talks I wanted to highlight on the Blandin on Broadband blog: Aneesh Chopra and Clive Thompson. Mostly for the sake of archive, I’ll do this in two posts. (The talks will be broadcast in MPR over the next few weeks. I’m afraid I can’t find a detailed schedule – I’ll add a link if/when I do find it.)

Aneesh Chopra was the first US CTO under President Obama in 2009. He spoke at length about US Government’s efforts to encourage private industry to partner with or at least engage with government efforts. It’s a model that can and is playing out at a local level. (One example that comes to mind quickly is the Hack for MN coming up June 21-22, which is modeled after a national effort.)

Chopra laid out a challenge, “This is the decade we can solve the greatest problems. We need to find the hidden path to do it.” The hidden path is latent human capital. To tap into that capital we need an open platform, we need to look outside our own walls (in this case, government’s) and we need to celebrate the frontline workers to help define the problem. Other tools required include: open data, competition and prizes, ability to attract talent, crowdsourcing and iterative process.

He offered Challenge.gov as an example. It is a government portal where departments can post “challenges” or contests to encourage private companies and individuals to contribute work for a chance at a prize. He mentioned that Congress has authorized every department to offer challenges up to $50 million – so these aren’t kids’ games they are real opportunities. And real people have offered great solutions saving the government time and money while earning themselves real money and reputation. And the best way to get people to participate in the challenge? Chopra says ask them to join the effort.

Another example is the Presidential Innovation Fellows (from the website)…

This highly-competitive program pairs talented, diverse individuals from the innovation community with top civil servants to tackle many of our Nation’s biggest challenges, and to achieve a profound and lasting social impact. These teams of government experts and private-sector doers are taking a “lean startup” approach and applying methods like user-centered design to achieve results for the American people in months, not years.

I find the prospects so exciting. The overriding tools required here are technology and openness; two tools that have the power to help us solve the greatest problems in this decade. Tools that we can build locally as well as nationally!