#govcap

Lastly, we interviewed Dwayne Spradlin, Chief Executive Officer, Health Data Consortium (HDC). Dwayne Spradlin was previously the president and CEO at InnoCentive, Inc., the crowdsourcing pioneer connecting corporations, government, and foundations to a global network of innovators over the internet. Dwayne covered how people working in healthcare can spearhead open innovation initiatives. He intently discussed the need for organizations to strategically empower their own employees in the problem solving process and spoke explicitly about how patients would benefit from the open health data movement.  He also discussed the challenges specific to open health data and how these can be overcome.

Team Members: Elizabeth Calmeyer, Sandra Kim, Theresa Langley, Hortensia Perez Seldner, Rachael Young The Governance Lab (GovLab) is a research, training, and experimentation laboratory that focuses on improving people’s lives by addressing real world challenges through institutional redesign. Through the OPEN NYU project, GovLab worked with Capstone teams and stakeholders across the University to design and test processes and technological platforms for engaging the NYU community in promoting better governance. This Capstone team (The Team) was tasked with engaging university employees in order to test the hypothesis “engaging employees leads to the creation of better and more legitimate decisions.” The client, the NYU Division of Operations, identified the Department of Public Safety (DPS) as the subclient. The client believed that the “frontline” experience and perspective that public safety officers have give them valuable insight that could be used to improve operations. GovLab was also interested in testing strategies for engaging populations that lack the level of digital access that crowdsourcing projects and platforms tend to rely on. I. The Problem Identified by DPS DPS decided The Team should focus on the customer service role public safety officers play in serving their “clients” or members of the NYU community and other visitors on campus. II. Theory of Change Tapping into university employee experience, and the wisdom of the broader NYU crowd, yields more effective solutions to DPS governance challenges than DPS managers would have otherwise identified. III. Key Project Features The Team designed a survey around DPS’s 2 primary interests: a) to prevent a specific, common problem faced by officers: the “problematic interactions” that occur when people entering campus buildings refuse to show required ID. In this case, DPS management and employees identified the problem—the process of checking IDs—and the broader community will be involved in the intermediate stage of proposing a solution. b) to learn more about perceptions of public safety on the NYU campus. In this case, the crowd (students, faculty, and staff) is being used to help identify the problem by giving DPS more information about safety levels on campus. The Team designed its process with the OPEN NYU knowledge database in mind, incorporating additional questions in the survey specific to public safety officers that attempted to capture more information about their skills and experiences that would be of interest to the knowledge database. IV. Key Stakeholders DPS presented an opportunity to experiment with engaging “frontline” staff who interface with the entire NYU community. Although they are generally left out of decision-making processes, DPS believed officers had valuable insights and expertise that could improve operations. Given that the perceptions and experiences of the NYU community, as DPS’s “client,” were of such central importance to DPS, The Team decided the NYU community was also a key stakeholder with valuable insight on safety, and solicited feedback more broadly from students, faculty, and other University staff. V. Outcomes As of May 12, 2014 the survey was released to DPS officers and the NYU community via the NYU Minute, garnering over 250 responses in the first 5 hours. VI. Working with the Client Once we identified DPS as the sub-client, we had productive conversations about the project, but it was a time-consuming process going through the many necessary levels of the department’s organizational structure to ultimately reach captains and officers themselves. Staff turnover was an obstacle to execute the survey, which led to significant delays, as The Team sought to identify a fixed project contact within the department, bring the individual up to speed on the project and obtain buy-in, make requested modifications to the project, and devise final steps. In the end, and as a very crucial component, DPS expressed genuine interest in the idea of crowdsourcing, and may utilize this method of engagement to improve departmental governance in the future. Our initial aim was to test a variety of variables, however, given time constraints and challenges navigating University bureaucracy, the final product became an email survey, with questions tailored to the type of responder. VII. Lessons Learned Based on the experience of this project, The Team concludes crowdsourcing in a university setting is a challenging endeavor, requiring many rounds of approval, and the potential to incur significant delays. Having a dedicated client contact is critical for success, ideally an individual who is committed to the project with the authority and ability to drive implementation. Additionally, a written agreement with outlined responsibilities and timelines, could have maintained project momentum and provided continuity during staff turnover. VIII. Actionable Next Steps The Team recommends running the survey over the course of a minimum of 5 days, along with efforts to encourage participation via NYU’s Facebook and Twitter pages and announcements during each shift at the officers’ daily roll call. In order to determine future engagement efforts, the survey should be closed after at least 5 days, results should then be analyzed for descriptive statistics on the demographics of responders and characteristics of the ideas submitted. The most promising responses surrounding the ID question should be presented to DPS for consideration to improve the process of showing IDs on campus; while the responses surrounding safety should be tracked against DPS crime data to aid in the department’s determination of future organizational and deployment choices. Lastly, GovLab should draw one DPS responder and one non-DPS responder at random to receive a gift certificate to the NYU bookstore in the amount of an iPad Mini (plus applicable sales tax). The winners should be publicized in order to encourage future participations.

Based on her suggestion, we will clarify our project's goal, decide the platform, and meet SEA to discuss and confirm these ideas.

We met as group, and then with Prof. Prasad, and decided we would update our goals for our experiment. Prof. Prasad encouraged us to do a single-round experiment with the goal being to solicit as many solutions for PSD to make better decisions surrounding deployment or customer service. In our process we will collect solutions from our crowd of experts via phone, email, or both. Our crowd will include PSD Captains, Officers, and Supervisors, an NYU administrator who has experience working with public safety during large-scale events, and a member of the Student Body Council. We will provide incentives to encourage participation. Suggestions will be synthesized and then presented to PSD decision makers. We will test the overall process and ask ourselves "Did the suggestions we were able to crowdsource lead to a better decision, than if those voices were not included in the process?" On Tuesday, Feb 18th, we will meet with Jerry Matthews, Assistant Vice President of Safety at NYU, and share with him our ideas in order to set expectations for our project and solidify our steps going forward.

To fine-tune this idea, we'll meet professors and Associate Director of Graduate Education at Stern and get their feedbacks. After we create mockups of the platform, we'll present this idea to Stern student groups (pilots) and solidify agreement on platform and schedule.

On another note, when we tried emailing Jan Hamilton on scheduling a time to meet and update her on our progress, she informed us that she has resigned from her post as NYU's Assistant Director of Uniformed Services. Jan was our immediate contact, working with us by providing the direct link to the captains and thus the officers we interviewed. We're not sure how Jan's departure will affect the progression of our project and we hope to connect with Jerry/Owen/Allison when class convenes on next steps.