Government of Canada internal IT Innovation Campaign

The Government of Canada has opened what I would call an ideas market, a system to submit ideas, vote on them, and comment on them.  The Campaign is internal only and for IT staff only.  You can see a screenshot (by permission of the GC and the developers, Publivate)

Rather than give a URL which most of you can't access anyway, I'll just suggest that if you're in the Government of Canada, you can find more information and the link to the site by searching for "innovation campaign" on GCPEDIA (which is also accessible within GC only).  The site opened for submissions of ideas May 4, and will close May 29, as you can see from the countdown bar in the upper right.

Like GCPEDIA itself, I consider this a great development, showing a government willing to embrace risk, try new technologies, and draw upon the expertise of the community (about 18,000 federal IT specialists, in this case).  I think this is a measured approach, and I certainly would expect that if successful, it will lead to more consultations more broadly both within the government as well as ones open to all Canadian citizens.

I think this approach is really effective for breaking silos and circulating information - in some of the ideas already, a few things being proposed turn out to already be available, people weren't just aware of them elsewhere in the government.

I'm using the hashtag #gcitic to discuss and ask questions about the campaign on Twitter.

UPDATE 2009-05-06: I should mention another innovation aspect of this site, which is that it is the first time I've seen machine translation use in an official way.  Currently all Government of Canada websites must have all text in both official languages, which is usually done through manual translation.  This makes it basically impossible to have a dynamic site with constant changes.  If we're allowed to use machine translation, it will make it much easier to bring up e.g. public blogs.  Now that being said, the translation engine they are using is Google Translate, which is ok for a free translator but is by no means perfect.  I know there's tons of work being done on machine translation at NRC and elsewhere in the government - it would be nice if there was a standard machine translation service available that we could also use... hmm... I think I'll submit an idea... ENDUPDATE

Google uses this approach internally, their site is called simply Google Ideas.

(Screenshot via blogoscoped.com - The Tools Google Uses Internally)

I have seen this approach used to some extent in the library community, the example I always point to is JISC Repository Ideas (which is still up, but no longer active).  There are probably many others that I have missed.

The Obama administration has also used this approach a number of times, see e.g. my recent posting about the National Dialogue to gather IT ideas for the Recovery.gov site.

Previously:
November 03, 2008  Government of Canada launches official wiki for federal employees