[Note: This was originally posted on a blog for government leaders, July 6, 2009]
My last posting was about the “goldmine” that exists in the information your government collects every day. It’s a goldmine because this data can be analyzed to determine how to save money by learning what policies and programs work best. Some governments have the internal skills to do this kind of sophisticated analysis or they can contract for those skills. But no government – not even the US Federal government – has the resources to analyze all the data they have.
What can you do about that? Maybe there’s an answer in a story about real gold mining from the authors of the book “Wikinomics”[1]:
A few years back, Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp was in trouble. Besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, the company had terminated mining operations…. [M]ost analysts assumed that the company’s fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, Goldcorp was likely to fold. Chief Executive Officer Rob McEwen needed a miracle.
Frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn’t reliably estimate the value and location of the gold on his property … [he] published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting. The “Goldcorp Challenge” made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates. Every scrap of information (some 400 megabytes worth) about the 55,000 acre property was revealed on Goldcorp’s Web site.
News of the contest spread quickly around the Internet and more than 1,000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries got busy crunching the data. Within weeks, submissions from around the world were flooding into Goldcorp headquarters. There were entries from graduate students, management consultants, mathematicians, military officers, and a virtual army of geologists. “We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry,” says McEwen. “When I saw the computer graphics, I almost fell out of my chair.”
The contestants identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, more than 80% of which yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding 8 million ounces of gold have been found – worth well over $3 billion. Not a bad return on a half million dollar investment.
You probably won’t be able to offer a prize to analysts, although you might offer to share some of the savings that result from doing things better. But, since the public has an interest in seeing its government work better, unlike a private corporation, maybe you don’t have to offer a prize.And there are many examples on the Internet where people are willing to help out without any obvious monetary reward.
Certainly not everyone, but enough people might be interested in the data to take a shot of making sense of it – students or even college professors looking for research projects, retired statisticians, the kinds of folks who live to analyze baseball statistics, and anyone who might find this a challenge.
The Obama administration and its new IT leaders have made a big deal about putting its data on the Web. There are dozens of data sets on the Federal site data.gov[2], obviously taking care to deal with issues of individual privacy and national security. Although their primary interest is in transparency of government, now that the data is there, we’ll start to see what people out there learn from all that information. Alabama[3] and the District of Columbia, among others, have started to do the same thing.
You can benefit a lot more, if you too make your government’s data available on the web for analysis. Then your data, perhaps combined with the Federal data and other sources on the web, can provide you with an even better picture of how to improve your government – better than just using your own data alone.
- “Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration”, Business Week, Feb. 1, 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2007/id20070201_774736.htm
- “Data.gov open for business”, Government Computer News, May 21, 2009, http://gcn.com/articles/2009/05/21/federal-data-website-goes-live.aspx
- “Alabama at your fingertips”, Government Computer News, April 20, 2009, http://gcn.com/articles/2009/04/20/arms-provides-data-maps-to-agencies.aspx
© 2011 Norman Jacknis