Case Studies

A core part of the Collaboration Project's mission is to find and study instances where collaborative technology has been deployed successfully in government. Our methodology breaks cases down into four key questions: Business Challenge, Approach Taken, Results Achieved, and Lessons Learned.

One of the most powerful aspects of web 2.0 is that it allows users to produce a central base of knowledge that dynamically builds order from individual inputs. That's the fundamental idea behind sites like Wikipedia, and we're also using it to power our Case Library. Please click the "Add a New Case Study" button in the right sidebar to add your own cases, or feel free to add new links and details to existing cases. You can also take advantage of the ability to rate or label content to help us organize and rank our cases.

In the future, this library will present a case list sorted by ratings, labels, and other attributes. For now, please enjoy browsing, reading, and contributing.

All Case Studies

• American Solutions For Winning the Future — A non-partisan organization started by Newt Gingrich. The organizations' goal is to provide a forum for the American people, allowing them to share their solutions to problems facing the United States. This wiki site allows registered users to draft proposals, create teams, post comments and rewrite proposed solutions.
• Arizona State Decision Theater — In 2005 Arizona State University created the Decision Theater, an innovative technology that provides participants a 260 degree screen with three dimensional models. In this environment decision makers can access scenarios that provoke collaborative thinking. In its three years it has provided novel solutions for companies and towns and continues to improve.
• Camden Success Project — The city of Camden, New Jersey decided to team up with Microsoft and their new Citizen Service Platform technology in order to help them track and complete their residents' service requests. Now all of Camden's city departments are connected, the mayor is able to oversee service request processing like never before and residents are able to call any department or go online to report their request.
• Chicago Police Department's CLEAR system — In 2001 the Chicago Police Department (CPD) partnered with the Oracle Corporation to develop the Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis system (CLEAR). This relational database program allows the CPD to streamline many processes such as filing crime reports, evidence tracking, and human resources services, while also giving officers in the field a powerful tool to assist in apprehending suspects. CLEAR has proven so successful that is currently being used throughout Illinois and is recognized by the U.S. Justice Department as a law enforcement best practice.
• Diplopedia — In September of 2006, the Department of State created Diplopedia, an internet encyclopedia for all personnel of the Department of State. This program allowed staff of the department and members of intelligence communities to pass down and share information by posting or editing articles.
• Dipnote — In September of 2007 the State Department launched its first ever blog site called "Dipnote". Dipnote offers the public a chance to take part in discussions involving public policy. The blog also provides a direct source of information pertaining to foreign policy. Dipnote is in its first year and is already showing promising signs for the future.
• Environmental Protection Agency's National Dialogue Jam Sessions and Partner Blog — EPA Chief Information Officer Molly O'Neill launched the National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information in November 2007. The Dialogue is an initiative to solicit ideas from agency employees, stakeholders, and citizens that will improve access to EPA's environmental information as well as enhance its utility. Jam Sessions and a Partnership Blog have both been deployed to spark discussion, and the EPA plans to draft a Strategic Plan built upon the results of these efforts by the end of Summer 2008.
• Environmental Protection Agency's Puget Sound Information Challenge — At the 2007 Environmental Information Symposium, EPA's Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information, Molly O'Neill invited all Conference participants to participate in a two-day online collaboration, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, to assist the Puget Sound Partnership Leadership Council in collecting the best information, Web 2.0 tools and ideas pertaining to the protection of this Pacific Northwest waterway.
• Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model Working Group — The Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC) developed an interagency collaborative working group with the purpose of updating the Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model. With 124 participants from 30 federal agencies, the group worked to create a data model with more streamlined information exchange processes.
• Fix My Street — A wiki site created by My Society in order to help resolve physical problems needing to be fixed in communities within the United Kingdom. Problems, some of which include landscaping, rubbish and street lighting are reported on the site and are then emailed by the website to the corresponding town council.
• Flu Wiki — While federal, state, and local governments plan for a potential pandemic influenza, a passionate online community of concerned citizens have taken the initiative to utilize Flu Wiki to inform each other about a wide variety of public health and emergency preparnedness issues pertaining to an outbreak.
• Future Melbourne — The opinions and thoughts of the Australian public were gathered and harnessed using wiki technology in order to improve upon the ten year strategic vision plan the government wants to undertake for the city of Melbourne.
• GovLoop — In June 2008, Young Government Leaders co-founder Steve Ressler launched GovLoop, a new social networking site that strives to build a strong online community connecting government professionals and promoting knowledge sharing. This 'Facebook for Feds' includes individual social profiles, an events calendar, career resources, and a diverse collection of blogs. By mid-July, the site boasts more than 250 members and a rapidly growing array of content.
• Great Lakes Wiki — Students from Michigan State University were seeking a better way for stakeholders in the Great Lakes region to promote positive environmental change. They launched the Great Lakes Wiki in the fall of 2006. The site helps citizens, students, policy makers, scientists, environmentalists, business operators, and government entities such NOAA and EPA collaboratively publish news and information about the Great Lakes region's ecology, culture, economy, and recreational offerings.
• Loma Linda University Medical Center's Geographic Information System — Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC) is a level-one trauma center serving a population of more than 3.3 million. Recognizing the fragmentation of a massive emergency response operation that included fire and police departments, local hospitals, ambulances and rescue helicopters, LLUMC CEO Ruthita Fike in 2005 proposed building a situational awareness tool linking patients with emergency assets.
• Los Angeles Fire Department — Beginning in 2004 the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has engaged in an ambitious effort to utilize a wide-variety of Web 2.0 technologies including twitter, a blog, a real-time alert service, a Flickr photo site, Jott and RSS Feeds. Public information officers Brian Humphrey and Ron Myers have been particularly vigilant in syndicating LAFD's online content, ensuring that critical emergency information reaches a constellation of nearly 20,000 websites and blogs.
• MAX Federal Community — As part of the Budget Formulation and Executive Line of Business (BFELoB) initiative, the Federal budgeting community identified the need for multi-agency collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge management. To meet that need, the BFELoB in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established a secure government-only collaboration wiki site known as the "MAX Federal Community." The site quickly proved so useful that it was extended beyond budgeting to include a wide scope of activities and topics. Any executive branch employee can use The Community to collaborate within their organization or with other executive branch organizations. More than 7,000 people are currently using the site for everything imaginable - sharing information and approaches, collaboratively developing documents, discussing issues, posting training opportunities, conducting data calls, various council activities, and much more.
• More Perfect — More Perfect seeks to enable greater direct public involvement in the creation of laws and public policy by engaging a more diverse constituency to impact the policy process. They created an online wiki similar to Wikipedia, to open up the democratic process---providing a platform for constructive, collaborative online discussion for all who want to participate. By combining leading edge technology and more traditional community outreach, More Perfect brings a diverse population into the process of creating policy, and provides a venue for policy makers to understand the views of citizens.
• NASA World Wind — By using Wiki technology and satellite imagery, NASA has opened the door for continuous evolution of the World Wind software program. Anyone who downloads the program is immediately able to use the wiki to suggest code modifications, which allows for the inclusion of any new portable, high-performance 3D graphics.
• National Academy of Public Administration — The National Academy of Public Administration sought to establish an internal wiki site to better organize and manage research, interview notes, and data gathered from the various Academy projects. Early results demonstrate significant efficiencies in data collection and analysis. These efficiencies managed to save one five-member project team several months worth of time.
• National Institutes of Health on Second Life — The National Institutes of Health (NIH) sought to establish more direct interaction with public and private sector partners, citizens, and other members of the NIH community. Second Life, the virtual world filled with avatars, creates opportunities for members of the NIH community to become more accessible, laying the groundwork to strengthen intergovernmental interaction and virtual collaboration. They can leave messages, access information, or converse with someone from the agency---all while being immersed in the environment.
• Neighborhood Knowledge California — Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA) is a statewide, interactive website that assembles and maps a variety of databases that can be used in neighborhood research. NKCA plots real-time information on electronic city maps to reflect instances of housing code violations, tax problems, tenant complaints, fire violations, and more. The site also functions as a geographic repository for users to map their own communities by uploading their own datasets.
• New Zealand Police Act — In order to raise awareness of and increase public participation in the redevelopment of New Zealand's Police Act 1958, the Police Act review team opened a wiki-based collaborative effort to rewrite the Act. This case met a global audience and drew extensive participation as well as media coverage, and established a strong example of utilizing collaborative technologies in the writing of laws.
• NOAA Virtual World — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department has launched themselves into a virtual world thanks to Second Life. People can now be educated about the Earths' environment in a myriad of ways, including standing on a plane while going through a hurricane or virtually witnessing the ice caps melting by standing right on them.
• Number 10 Downing Street E-Petitions — In late 2006 the office of the British Prime Minister sought to simplify the process of delivering petitions to Number 10 Downing Street, and allow petitioners to reach a potentially greater audience for their topics. The perceived result is a greater line of communication between citizens and government.
• ODNI Intellipedia — In response to intelligence missteps leading up to 9/11 and the Iraq War, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) sought to build a flatter US Intelligence community better equipped to coordinate and share classified surveillance information. The technology solution, "Intellipedia," is a peer-to-peer online collaboration network built on the same open-source software used by Wikipedia which allows intelligence analysts to share information through the federal government's classified Intelink intranet site. Intellipedia has already facilitated many small wins for the intelligence community, and the future seems bright for this collaborative tool.
• Palomar Medical Center West — Palomar Pomerado Health (PPH) teamed up with Cisco Systems, Inc. to launch a virtual Second Life model in February 2008 of new medical center that will not be completed until 2011. The cost of the online real estate was only $1,695, but PPH had to spend another $135,000 in design costs. Although it is still too early to tell how successful this initiative will be, Second Life provides the hospital with an effective platform to preview the new facility and recruit human capital.
• Patient Opinion — A small pilot program looking to improve the quality of service and care between health service providers and citizens through enhanced communication ends up expanding to encompass all of England. Patient Opinion helps bridge the gap between patients and their health service providers by connecting them together in a blog that allows for citizens to rate or write about their health care experiences and for health service providers to respond, listen and learn.
• Peer-to-Patent Project, US Patent and Trademark Office — New York Law School piloted a Peer-to-Patent Project that enables the public to submit information and commentary relevant to the claims of 250 pending patent applications in computer architecture, software, and information security via the Web. This pilot program demonstrated that organized public participation can improve the quality of issued patents.
• Scorecard.org, Environmental Defense Fund — The Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit that partners with businesses, governments, and communities to find practical environmental solutions, was searching for a way to gather several hundred sources of public data into a nation-wide database. They created Scorecard.org, which aggregates this information in order to create a nation-wide tool for assessing environmental risk from pollution and toxic chemicals.
• Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals — The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has created a wiki for court business, providing electronic access to Seventh Circuit case information, rules, procedures and opinions. This is the first public wiki launched by the federal judiciary. The site is based on the principle that comments from lawyers across the nation are important to the judicial process because issues of federal practice, especially in the appellate courts, are common ones.
• Southern California Wildfire Response — The disaster management and recovery efforts in the wake of Southern California's 2007 wildfires were greatly enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies. Through a free wiki application, all local residents, news organizations and disaster relief were able to access the wiki to keep up to date with the rapid pace of events. KPBS, KNBC.com, Facebook, Myspace and Flickr all provided effective online venues for assiting with emergency coordination, as this user-generated content provided a more comprehensive detaling of events and allowed citizens to be engaged in events around them.
• State of Rhode Island — The State of Rhode Island wanted to provide citizens with centralized access to public information on the web. Rhode Island created a set of interactive Web 2.0-based GovTracker Web Services, which allow for diverse software applications to share data despite being on different operating systems. The state's "media central" contains pages for blogs, podcasts, calendars, mashup pages and more. RI.gov now also has open source do-it-yourself tools that allows the media and public to subscribe to the latest bills and elections information via RSS feeds.
• Sunlight Foundation's OpenCongress.org — OpenCongress.org was created by the Sunlight Foundation as a tool to educate citizens about the congressional process and in turn facilitate a more transparent political process. The site has increased constituent awareness of congressional operations by serving as a vital gateway for official government data.
• The Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice — The Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) was established to foster both offline and online conversations in order to achieve semantic interoperability and data integration. To date, SICoP has issued several white papers and hosted numerous tutorials, conferences, and pilot projects.
• The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration — The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration developed a series of online communities of practice (CoPs) that have served as an effective means for employees to collaborate and disseminate information. Already CoPs have proved successful in addressing critical organizational needs such as streamlining regulatory processes and mitigating customer service challenges.
• Toronto Access to Integrated Services (CAISI) — In 2005, the Toronto Client access to integrated Services and Information Project (CAISI) was constructed to aid the increasing number of the homeless in Canada. By creating a software program that integrated information from various shelters and hospitals, volunteers hoped to make a difference for the homeless.
• Transportation Security Administration's Evolution of Security — TSA developed the blog Evolution of Security in order to improve relations between the agency's security personnel and airline passengers. With a team of straight-talking and caring bloggers, the agency has experienced early success in leveraging Web 2.0 to identify and solve potential service problems.
• Transportation Security Administration's IdeaFactory — With 43,000 frontline employees dispersed at airports nationwide, the Transportation Security Administration identified Web 2.0 technology as a promising way to harness the collective wisdom of this workforce with the purpose of generating strategies to improve the agency's mission performance. Launched on April 25, 2007, IdeaFactory is a secure intranet site that allows employees to offer suggestions for improving TSA. As of March 2008, employees had submitted over 4,500 ideas and offered more than 39,000 comments. Quite impressively, an estimated 20 ideas solicited from IdeaFactory have already been implemented by the TSA as national policy.
• TRIPWIRE — A declassified surveillance technology developed by The Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) and GCS Research uses GIS (geospatial) technology to specifically locate and track acoustic sounds coming from people, animals or vehicles. This technology has the potential to serve as a fast and efficient mode of means for communicating between leaders and front line workers for national security needs.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative — Teaching about genocide past and present is the main motivation behind The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative. Through the power of Google Earth along with data/information, photos and testimonials, it is hoped that greater awareness and knowledge about genocide will be generated, helping genocide prevention.
• Utah Politicopia — Representative Steve Urquhart of Utah was seeking a way to encourage greater political dialogue among Utah's constituents. Representative Urquhart founded Politicopia, a new e-democracy initiative, which serves as a continuous virtual town meeting. The site was set up using a simple wiki-based platform, which enables focused debate on current and potential state legislature bills, as well as on a variety of broader political issues.
• Virtual Alabama — Virtual Alabama went live in August 2006. By November 2007, there were over 1800 online users contributing the best available data from each of Alabama's 67 counties. Powered by Google Earth Enterprise, the system was developed for a fraction of what such a powerful tool might otherwise cost. The State has employed the tool to provide enhanced coordination and awareness to the State's first responders. The ability to seamlessly aggregate data in an intergovernmental environment offers promise for performing collaborative analysis, expanding the reach and impact of service delivery, managing stakeholder expectations, and tackling other challenges that increasingly reach across the traditional boundaries of government.
• Washington D.C.'s Citywide Data Warehouse — The District of Columbia provides an online Citywide Data Warehouse allowing for real-time Real Simple Syndication, extensible markup language and ATOM Web publishing standard feeds that dramatically increase the data's potential to highlight relationships, trends and other areas in time to affect service delivery. The feeds are compiled from more than 150 datasets, ranging from crime reports to pothole complaints. Surveillance mashups can monitor the status of road repairs while datasets on adult and juvenile crime, home sales, and alcohol permits provide other useful insight. To date, Washington's Citywide Data Warehouse site lacks an easy-to-understand user guide or a central site where citizen mashups could be displayed, categorized, discussed and compared, but these improvements are certainly possible.
• Washington State's Digital Governance Plan — The State of Washington was searching for an efficient method of improving communications both between government employees and with citizens. The Statewide Enterprise Network (SEN) is the private statewide intranet for state and local government. It is a secure, network that connects together over 1,100 sites statewide and provides reliable and economical voice, data, and video communications for state agencies, commissions, and boards. It also been instrumental in changing the citizen's experience with government by expanding direct access through the Internet.
• Westchester County Green Map — In 2006 Westchester county executive Andy Spano launched a Global Warming Task Force to create a countywide action plan to reduce emissions and promote sustainable development. To achieve Spano's environmental goals for Westchester, the county entered into a partnership with the Green Map System, Inc. to develop interactive mapmaking tools that increase conservation awareness and promote citizens to identify local green activities. Westchester has already received multiple awards for this ambitious use of GIS technology.
• Wiser Earth — Wiser Earth is a wiki website created by Paul Hawken and the National Capital Institute. Their mission is to connect non-governmental organizations and individuals who work on and share similar beliefs about issues like climate change, poverty, the environment, social justice, conservation and human rights.