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The Next Policy Challenge

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The Next Policy Challenge

The ASU School of Public Affairs is leading the development of The Next Policy Challenge, a follow-up to The Policy Challenge (2011-2012). The Next Policy Challenge is a policy foresight exercise, focussed on the policy challenges that may face the United States over the coming decade as economic transformation, technological advancement, environmental change and social adaptation come together in powerful new ways. What will be the pressing, complex policy challenges facing us in the 2025 and beyond, what changes to our governance arrangements will such challenges require, what new inter-agency collaborations will be necessary and how can we start preparing now to be resilient in the face of unknown challenges in the future?

Where the Next Policy Challenge differs from traditional expert-led policy foresight exercises is in its focus on the latent power of collective intelligence to consider this problem of how to prepare for an uncertain future using open ideation and collaboration. This represents the parallel component of the NPC experiment: as an experiment in using new forms of collaboration - specifically, ideation through IdeaScale and collaborative writing through GitHub. A first stage open ideation process will use the IdeaScale platform to have the crowd propose and rank a top ten list of emerging, complex public policy challenges currently flying below the radar. Subsequent stages will test the hypothesis proposed by the noted social media researcher Clay Shirky that the next great frontier in open source collaboration lies in platforms such as GitHub that were originally designed to facilitate open source software development. Using the GitHub platform, teams and individuals will develop the stage one list of ten policy challenges into more fully-developed statements of those problems and robust, sophisticated policy proposals for building a resilient policy response apparatus.

The Next Policy Challenge is also designed as a test of the emerging ideas that have been advanced in the open governance domain. Are crowds truly wise, under what conditions and for what purposes is crowdsourcing an effective process for policy analysis and development, and does crowdsourcing exceed the insights and outputs from expert-led processes? What unintended consequences emerge in open ideation processes, especially in light of the differing motives and agendas that participants bring to the process? What characteristics of open collaboration systems function to bring together dispersed groups? Does the presence of some reward - albeit non-monetary, recognition based, or implicit - challenge the very nature of open collaboration? Through a combination of data collected through the IdeaScale and GitHub platforms, and through surveys and interviews with participants, the Next Policy Challenge is design as much as an experiment testing the rhetoric of open governance as it is a policy foresight competition.