Last week I blogged about crowdsourcing. Maybe some blog readers have heard ads for an initiative Pepsi is sponsoring called the PepsiRefresh Project. Making use of the Internet-age double meaning of the word "refresh" -- both for the kind of refreshment Pepsi hopes to provide thirsty people and the "refresh" command on the Internet suggesting renewal and starting over -- Pepsi is pledging to provide $1.3 million a month in grants (provided in sums of $5K, $25K, $50K, and $250K) to self-nominated social service ideas for making a better world that get the most votes from people visiting the project website.
I first came across this approach about a year ago, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation developed a list of about 15 or so historic renovation projects for sites in the Boston area, invited the public to vote via a website for their top priority, and pledged to provide a grant to the winning project. (I am assuming Boston wasn't the only city where this was done.)
I checked out the PepsiRefresh website, and actually voted for an idea. (You need to register in order to vote, which takes about two minutes.) For February, there are about 800 ideas that have been nominated in different categories (such as health, arts and culture and neighborhoods).
Some come from very established organizations, such as Teach for America and the American Legion (who in effect are asking for grants from Pepsi for their existing programs). But others are local grassroots initiatives coming from individuals or small groups, such as the Quad Cities Animal Welfare Center (in Iowa), which is seeking $5,000 to get volunteers to help elderly people take care of their pets -- this is the one I voted for! -- and a schoolteacher seeking $250,000 for an initiative to keep kids out of gangs in Kokomo, Indiana.
The site is quite easy to navigate, and tells visitors what the most-popular ideas are in different categories, as well as linking to lower-ranked ideas in similar areas to encourage visitors to click around.
It's a fascinating example of crowdsourcing. Obviously, it provides a low-cost way to learn what "the crowd" thinks. But it has another virtue as well. It provides a way to educate and inspire the people who visit the site about public service initiatives. Maybe it can give people ideas about specific projects they might want to try themselves. More generally -- with the help of Pepsi's campaign to publicize the initiative -- it can help develop buzz, especially among young people, about service.
It is hard to imagine this approach being applied directly in government, as a way to determine, at a micro level, priorities for spending taxpayer funds. Among other things, worries about organized voting campaigns (of the sort Jonathan Zittrain was worried about in the Kennedy School presentation that I discussed in the blog last week) would prohibit this method from determining priorities for spending money. But clearly there must be ways for federal agencies to use this approach in order to gather information as part of a decision-making process, as well as to educate citizens about real-life prioritizations that agencies need to deal with all the time. One could imagine the National Park Service explaining various competing maintenance or other projects, and soliciting public feedback. One might even do like Pepsi, and ask visitors at each park to nominate ideas for park improvements, of which the most-promising could be costed out and then voted on.
Posted on Feb 09, 2010 at 8:46 AM0 comments
Earlier this week, at our weekly faculty research lunch seminar at the Kennedy School (one of the few "free lunches" that has survived our budget crunch-driven cost savings), Jonathan Zittrain, the Internet law and policy guru at Harvard Law School, gave a fascinating presentation on various developments in the burgeoning world of crowdsourcing, broadly conceived.
Zittrain began by discussing sites that try to bring inventors to problems -- someone will advertise a problem and a prize for the first innovator to solve it. The government, I have argued in the past, should use such sites more often. It's a subset of the concept of using prizes as a procurement tool -- something, to my understanding, of which ederal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra is a devotee. (There is a great Wikipedia entry that explains this further.)
Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.
Zittrain's purpose was to raise questions about the downsides of all this. Terrorists could request help on having people develop different chemicals that could be put together to create some horrendous weapon of mass destruction, without the innovators being able to connect the dots on the little part of the project they were working on.
The Iranian government could have people match photos of protesters against huge photo rosters of the residents of Teheran. There are already a number of sites that give people micro-payments to vote on Amazon-style consumer feedback applications in favor (or against!) a product, a movie, a book, or whatever -- including in some cases getting people to click that all reviews that argued the opposite were "unhelpful."
Zittrain's presentation was fascinating, but my reaction was partly that lots of good things have problems associated with them (think of cars as a great example), and that some of these problems -- such as inventors working on a narrow part of an evil chemical without knowing the broader picture -- could occur in a non-crowdsourcing world as well.
Zittrain seemed to be a fan of using crowdsourcing techniques themselves to reduce the problem, by various kinds of opportunities for alerts or warnings (though obviously these too could be subject to voting manipulation of the kind he described). Nothing's perfect, but I came away from Zittrain's thought-provoking talk probably with the opposite conclusion from the one he intended us to draw, namely that there is a lot of cool stuff going on here.
Posted on Feb 05, 2010 at 10:18 AM2 comments
The Merit Systems Protection Board recently issued a report, titled Fair and Equitable Treatment: Progress Made and Challenges Remaining (wow -- the folks at MSPB seem to be taking a leaf from the title writers at GAO!) that is attracting attention for a survey of federal employees asking whether supervisors show favoritism in making promotion decisions.
An article on the survey by Alyssa Rosenberg in Govexec.com has drawn 109 comments (!) online, as of this writing, and is listed as one of the Web site's most popular articles. MSPB conducted the survey in 2007, and found that 72 percent of federal employees said promotions were based on who they knew, while just 40 percent cited competence as a reason for advancement, and 36 percent believed the key factor to be hard work.
There are really good reasons to take these findings with a huge grain of salt in terms of how well they represent the actual behavior of supervisors. A really well-established finding in social psychology is that people have "positive illusions" (to use the phrase of Professor Shelley Taylor of UCLA, who has investigated the phenomeon most extensively) about themselves. In area after area, most people -- generally around 70 percent -- think they are above average, which of course is statistically impossible. (Technically, 70% could be above average if "average" means the mean, but it's a safe guess that most people are intuitively answering the question using the median as their benchmark -- the performance of the person in the fiftieth percentile of the population.) Most people think they are above-average drivers and above average in interpersonal skills. And a simliar 70 percent of employees believe they are above-average employees.
These (honest) perceptions create a built-in problem for any workplace decisions -- including promotion decisions (and pay for performance) -- that require managers to affirm that some employees are better than others. Most people turned down for promotion genuinely believe they are above-average and deserved to be promoted. So it's natural that when they aren't promoted, they blame something other than that they weren't as good as the person who got the job. The most obvious candidate is "favoritism."
An indication of how inaccurately many perceive the grounds for promotion is the finding from the survey that 31 percent of respondents thought promotion decisions were influenced by nepotism, which must be absurd given the tiny percentage of supervisor relatives who work in workplaces. Although I predict that this blog post will incite disagreement and maybe even insults, I still believe that nobody should conclude from these survey results that favoritism is a rampant problem in federal workplaces. Sure, one may assume that most supervisors like the person selected for promotion more than the ones they didn't choose, but in most (though obviously not all) cases, a supervisor has no real reason to like or dislike an employee other than job performance.
There are two caveats to this. First, don't take these thoughts as a ringing vote of endorsement for federal supervisors. As I suggested in a recent FCW column, the quality of first-line supervision is often a real problem in the government, and a target for reform. Surely there are supervisors who really do play favorites, without concern about workplace performance, although I am confident the problem is of nowhere near the magnitude this employee survey suggests.
The second caveat is that positive illusions are a fact -- people genuinely do often think they are better than they are -- and therefore must be taken into account in designing workplace systems. This suggests, for example, that employee evaluations (and possible pay for performance) be based on objective performance measures to the extent possible, rather than subjective judgments about hard work or good attitude. It is probably also the reason why many local governments have, unlike the federal government, traditionally based promotions on objective factors such as length of service, which, however, I think is a cure worse than the disease.
Posted on Feb 02, 2010 at 8:57 AM22 comments
Spring semester is just beginning at the Kennedy School, and two days ago I got an email from my colleague Bob Behn, who teaches a course on performance measurement in government. "At the moment, I have 57 students registered for [my performance measurement course]. Is this all your fault?"
He was referring to the fact that at the end of my fall-semester management and leadership survey course for our first-year Master's in Public Policy students, I give students recommendations for upper-level courses in management and leadership they might be interested in taking, and I mention Bob's course as one I like. However, I've done that in the past as well -- no change this year.
I asked Bob further about this, and it turns out there has been a big upturn in student interest in this course this year. (Actually, since he wrote the initial email, course enrollment is up to 64, and that is not counting a number of cross-registrants from Harvard's schools of education and public health who have said they would like to take the course as well.) In 2008 and 2009 the number of enrollees was 17 and 28 respectively. Since the course started in 2001, it has always had fewer than 30 students, except in 2006 and 2007, when enrollment was approximately 50.
As I always tell my master’s students, my hope is that using performance measures to improve organizational performance becomes as common and taken-for-granted among their generation of public and non-profit managers as it already is for managers in the business world. My colleague's enrollment figures for this year suggest that this important management tool for improving organizational performance is gaining traction with our next generation of public leaders.
Incidentally, blog readers should also know that Professor Behn -- who, it should be noted, is a fantastic teacher -- also teaches a one-week executive education program called "Driving Government Performance," which focuses on using performance measures to improve performance. Here's a link to the program, in case any readers (or people you know) might want to consider taking this course.
Posted on Jan 28, 2010 at 11:26 AM0 comments