FACT SHEET: Administration Celebrates Five-Year Anniversary of Challenge.gov with Launch of More than 20 New Public- and Private-Sector Prizes

“Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.”

- President Barack Obama, on his first day as President

Today, the Administration is celebrating the five-year anniversary of Challenge.gov, a historic effort by the Federal Government to collaborate with members of the public through incentive prizes to address our most pressing local, national, and global challenges. True to the spirit of the President’s charge from his first day in office, Federal agencies have collaborated with more than 200,000 citizen solvers—entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, students, and more—in more than 440 challenges, on topics ranging from accelerating the deployment of solar energy, to combating breast cancer, to increasing resilience after Hurricane Sandy.

Highlighting continued momentum from the President’s call to harness the ingenuity of the American people, the Administration is announcing:

• Nine new challenges from Federal agencies, ranging from commercializing NASA technology, to helping students navigate their education and career options, to protecting marine habitats.
• Expanding support for use of challenges and prizes, including new mentoring support from the General Services Administration (GSA) for interested agencies and a new $244 million innovation platform opened by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with over 70 partners.

In addition, multiple non-governmental institutions are announcing 14 new challenges, ranging from improving cancer screenings, to developing better technologies to detect, remove, and recover excess nitrogen and phosphorus from water, to increasing the resilience of island communities.

The Administration is hosting an event today with the Case Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and Georgetown University to mark the milestone anniversary of Challenge.gov and highlight these new announcements.

Background

On his first day in office, President Obama issued a memorandum encouraging all Federal departments and agencies to think of new and creative ways to collaborate with the American people. In response to the President’s call to action, over the past six years, more than 80 Federal agencies have collaborated with over 200,000 students, entrepreneurs, and others in tackling pressing local, national, and global issues through more than 440 challenges with prizes totaling more than $150 million.

Prizes provide several unique benefits for the government:

• Pay only for success. Prizes allow an agency to pay only for success and establish an ambitious goal without having to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed—a departure from traditional authorities like contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements. They also inspire thoughtful risk-taking by offering a level playing field through credible rules and robust judging mechanisms.
• Expand beyond the usual performers. Prizes allow and encourage agencies to reach beyond the “usual suspects” to increase the number of minds tackling a problem, often including out-of-discipline perspectives.
• Increase the overall amount of investment. Prizes allow agencies to increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars, with competitor investments often exceeding the prize purse by an order of magnitude.

The Administration’s leadership has been paired with strong bipartisan support for the use of prizes and challenges. In December 2010, Congress passed the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, providing all Federal agencies broad authority to conduct prize competitions. As described in a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to Congress on the Implementation of the Federal Prize Authority for FY14, Federal agencies have raced to take advantage of this new approach to problem-solving.

In addition, the General Services Administration (GSA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation have trained over 2,000 agency staff to create and run prize competitions through workshops, online resources, and an active community of practice. To highlight these ongoing efforts to enhance Federal expertise, GSA will follow-up on today’s event with an additional event tomorrow, bringing together a community of more than 300 prize practitioners to celebrate the past five years of Challenge.gov.

Incentive prizes and challenges also benefit participants and solvers by enabling them to launch their own companies, scale up their ideas, increase their pool of resources, or simply network. For example, Andrew Brimer and Abby Cohen—winners of the DEBUT challenge—were able to use their $10,000 winnings to start Sparo Labs, which now employs five full-time employees. To find additional prize and challenge success stories, click here.

New Steps Being Announced by the Administration Today

Today, the Administration is announcing new incentive prizes and challenges to find novel and ambitious solutions to important problems. These new prizes and challenges showcase growing ambition and sophistication in the public sector in the use of prizes, including the use of prizes in harnessing new uses of data, driving development of new technologies, increasing market adoption of existing solutions and interventions, and making progress in areas of social policy such as health, energy use, and education.

Helping More Children Succeed from Cradle to Career

The Department of Education (ED) is launching a Reach Higher Career App Challenge to help more students navigate their education and career options. ED is launching the Reach Higher Career App Challenge, a prize competition for new mobile app solutions that will help students navigate education and career pathways while increasing the capacity of career counselors to assist students in planning for their futures. The Challenge offers a cash prize pool of $225,000, and over $240,000 in additional non-cash prizes. The Reach Higher initiative is the First Lady's effort to inspire every student in America to take charge of their future by pursuing their education beyond high school. The Reach Higher Career App Challenge is part of a series of prize competitions from ED that seek to spur the development of new technology, products, and resources to prepare students for high-skill, high-wage, and high-demand occupations.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is launching a competition to address the “word gap” that occurs for low-income children due to limited early exposure to language. As part of the Administration’s overall early learning efforts, HRSA’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau is opening registration for the Bridging the Word Gap Challenge, which will make $300,000 in prizes available to spur innovative solutions to promote the early language environment and address the “word gap.” Researchers believe that this word gap arises due to the substantial difference in exposure to language for children from low-income families as compared to children from higher-income families, with studies showing a gap of over 30 million words by age 3 between low-income families and more affluent ones. Early language exposure not only has a strong influence on language development and school achievement, but on the overall trajectory of children’s lives, including later academic and occupational success. The goal of the Word Gap Challenge is to leverage existing technology and expertise to spur the development of low-cost, scalable, and technologically-based interventions that drives parents and caregivers to talk to and engage in more back-and-forth interactions with their young children.

Harnessing New Uses of Data to Protect the Environment

The Bureau of Reclamation is seeking new data tools to help protect and restore fish ecosystems. The Bureau of Reclamation, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is launching a $30,000 prize competition seeking improved methods to measure the food resources available for threatened and endangered fish. Every year, millions of dollars are spent on habitat restoration, improvement, and creation in rivers, streams, and estuaries. A winning solution will empower fish recovery managers to evaluate and optimize different habitat manipulations to produce the zooplankton and drift invertebrates that feed fish species targeted for recovery and protection. Protecting and restoring river systems is vital to ensuring that watersheds are healthy and able to continue providing the water supplies the United States needs now and into the future.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and USGS, with the assistance of ED, are working with the private sector to address nutrient pollution. Nutrient pollution is one of the nation’s most difficult environmental challenges. While nutrients are essential compounds for functioning ecosystems and the production of food, fiber, and livestock feed, excessive nutrient levels can dramatically alter aquatic environments and threaten economic and human health. Today, EPA, USGS, ED, the Great Lakes Observing System, and Esri are announcing the “Visualize Your Water” Challenge. This Challenge seeks to engage the innovative spirit of high school students in the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay watershed states to create compelling visualizations about nutrient pollution using geographic information system (GIS) software in conjunction with water quality data collected through Federal, state, and local efforts. The “Visualize Your Water” Challenge will help students cultivate career-oriented skills and learn about local nutrient pollution issues while encouraging environmental stewardship. This Challenge continues the work of the Challenging Nutrients Coalition, a coalition of Federal agencies and non-governmental organizations with the mission of improving our ability to measure, understand, and reduce nutrient pollution. This Challenge also builds on Esri’s philanthropic contribution of GIS mapping software to K-12 schools under the ConnectED Initiative.

The National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office is announcing a new data prize to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. In early 2016, the Executive Agents for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD) will launch a global data challenge designed to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Those who engage in IUU fishing circumvent conservation and management measures, avoid costs associated with sustainable fishing practices, and derive economic benefit from exceeding harvesting limits. By applying innovative analytic techniques to existing data sets, this data challenge seeks to develop a process, available to all, to more effectively identify and react to the global IUU fishing threat. The challenge will be sponsored by the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office and the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment.

Expanding and Benefiting from American Capabilities in Space

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is launching “Startup NASA”, a new initiative to encourage the use of federally funded technologies by start-up companies.  “Startup NASA” includes the opportunity for new companies to license NASA technologies with no up-front payment and kicks off an effort with the Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) to encourage more space technology spin-offs by entrepreneurs. Startup NASA helps address two of the biggest challenges faced by start-up companies: raising capital and securing intellectual property rights. By eliminating up-front licensing fees, NASA is letting new companies hold onto their cash while securing the intellectual property rights needed to secure their competitive market space. This benefit is available to companies formed to commercialize NASA technology.  In addition, to foster the creation of new start-up companies and encourage adoption of NASA technologies, NASA will work with the CAI to run a multi-phase business plan competition in 2016. CAI will review NASA’s portfolio of technologies and identify those that have near-term commercialization potential.  CAI will conduct outreach teams to explore the market potential of the technologies and write business plans.  The winners of the competition will be awarded a cash prize, provided by third-party venture capital investors, and will be encouraged to incorporate and pursue licensing the technologies from NASA, using their winnings as seed funding for the new business.

NASA is launching a competition for new strategies to “live off the land” when we explore new planets. In order to live on another planet, American astronauts will need to figure out how to live off the land so they do not have to bring as much with them. That is why NASA is seeking ideas for transforming in situ materials such as regolith or basalt from other planets into useful construction components. In-Situ Materials Challenge, which launches today, is open to the public until December 3 and will be hosted by NineSigma Inc. with $15,000 in prize awards. This challenge complements NASA’s 3-D Printed Habitat Centennial Challenge, which is offering up to $2.25 million for teams to demonstrate a recycling additive manufacturing system that can build a habitat using in situ resources. The Centennial Challenge will host its first demonstration event at the 2016 World Maker Faire.

Improving Public Safety

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is announcing the Gun Safety Technology Challenge. NIJ is announcing its Gun Safety Technology Challenge, which will test the reliability of firearms that have integrated and advanced safety technologies. Such advanced safety technologies could benefit users with improved personalization and added protections from theft and unauthorized use. However, the potential impact of these safety technologies on the reliability of firearms remains a concern. As discussed in the 2013 NIJ report entitled A Review of Gun Safety Technologies, these concerns need to be addressed both for potential impact on firearm performance and for garnering user acceptance of safety technologies. The Challenge will seek “apples to apples” comparisons to the extent possible, such that firearms both with, and without, these advanced gun safety technologies are tested and evaluated using a common methodology and equivalent ammunition.  

Commemorating our History

The National Park Service (NPS) will launch the Centennial Memorial Challenge. Memorials for the Future, a Design Challenge organized by the National Park Service (NPS) and the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), and the Van Alen Institute, invites interdisciplinary teams to propose new models for how our society commemorates the past. How can memorials continue to resonate over time and to different audiences? What national events, places, and people should take their place in our collective memory? Teams may explore memorial designs that are temporary, ephemeral, virtual, or event-focused, and that otherwise create a more inclusive process for creating memorials in Washington D.C. As NPS prepares to celebrate its Centennial in 2016, Memorials for the Future will re-invent Washington's traditional approach to permanent commemoration, creating new visions for how interactive experiences and rituals can share our diverse histories, heritage, and culture.

Capacity Building to Expand the Use of Prizes and Challenges

Over the past five years, the General Services Administration (GSA) has shown sustained leadership in providing support and assistance to all Federal agencies operating prize competitions and challenges. This has included managing the online platform Challenge.gov, as well as supporting a Federal community of practice of over 800 challenge practitioners. Today, the Administration is announcing new steps to build on this work, and to continue to expand the use of incentive prizes in creative ways at Federal agencies to solve difficult and important problems.

GSA will make it easier for Federal agencies to design and execute more ambitious prizes and challenges. The Challenge.gov platform will launch a new suite of tools to help agencies better manage incoming solutions and proposals, gauge the impact of challenges across portfolios, and engage more directly with communities. Agencies will have the ability to query the Challenge.gov database, run reports, and create visualizations from their data. Challenge.gov will expand the network of public users and potential solvers for agencies to engage by rolling out new community-based features to make it easier for the public to find, follow, participate in, and network around prize competitions. Challenge.gov will also launch a new mentorship program for Federal employees in October 2015 to amplify the benefits and positive impact of prizes by providing support and expertise to agencies as they design and execute competitions. In addition, during 2016, GSA will streamline and improve its professional services schedule offerings, including GSA Schedule 541 4G: Advertising and Integrated Marketing Solutions for Challenges and Competitions Services. As a result, agencies will have direct acquisition resources, improved contract usability, and increased program efficiency.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and global development leaders will open the Global Innovation Exchange, with funding opportunities valued at over $240 million. USAID, in collaboration with more than 70 development, academic, government, and private-sector organizations, is opening the beta version of the Global Innovation Exchange, a global marketplace for development innovation, which will connect innovators with over 100 funding opportunities valued at over $240 million. As a business intelligence engine for global development, the Exchange will bring the global innovation community online together in one place, make it easier for innovators and entrepreneurs to see their potential competitors, and make it easier for innovators and entrepreneurs to connect with potential partners, funders, collaborators, and customers. The Exchange aims to reduce potential duplication and improve decision-making around investments in development innovation, and will also feature relevant challenges from Challenge.gov, enabling more innovators to participate in Challenge.gov.

New Steps by Foundations, Industry, Non-Profits, and Others in Response to the Administration’s Call to Action

This Administration’s leadership to expand use of prizes in the public sector builds on the long-standing use of prizes in the private sector. Famous historical examples include the Orteig Prize, which inspired Charles Lindbergh to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, and the Ansari XPRIZEwhich demonstrated a manned spaceship capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface twice within two weeks.

Today, a growing community of foundations, non-profits, industry, and others are responding to the Administration’s all-hands-on-deck call to tackle the Grand Challenges of the 21st century with new prize efforts. In addition, several of these incentive prizes are being conducted in partnership with the Federal Government, a sign of the growing use of public-private partnerships to address high-impact challenges.

Living Longer, Healthier Lives

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is announcing plans to launch a series of open innovation contests to support healthy birth, growth, and development in children. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will launch the Healthy Birth, Growth, and Development (HBGD) Open Innovation platform to mobilize “unusual suspects” in the data science community to better understand how to improve neurocognitive and physical health for 165 million children worldwide. In spring 2016, HBGD will initiate a set of data science contests, with the goal of developing predictive models that quantify geographic, regional, cultural, socioeconomic, and nutritional trends that contribute to poor neurocognitive and physical growth outcomes in children. The open innovation contest approach represents an additional spectrum of tools that the Gates Foundation will use, in concert with traditional approaches, to collectively extract and evolve novel insights from large and complex global health data streams, and to harness innovation inherent in the collective community.

Conquer Paralysis Now (CPN) is announcing new prizes to address spinal cord injury. CPN is announcing a call for submissions for the second round of its Conquer Paralysis Now Challenge. This Challenge is designed to incentivize researchers to take greater risks and try more novel approaches to addressing spinal cord injury (SCI), with the ultimate goal of creating functional recovery for those with spinal cord injuries. CPN will award 10 individuals $50,000 each and two cross-sector teams $100,000 each for their unconventional and promising approaches. CPN will also encourage grant applicants to share their findings with the scientific community, even if they are considered failures, through the “Trial and Error” prize. CPN plans to award up to $20 million in grants and prizes over the next 10 years. The first team that can reach an unprecedented improvement in everyday functions of people living with chronic SCI will win the $10 million Grand Prize.

More than $3 million in prizes are being made available to improve cancer screening from mammography and lung CT imaging. The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Sage Bionetworks, with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, will make $3 million in prizes available to improve cancer screening through challenges titled Coding4Cancer. These Coding for Cancer (C4C) Challenges aim to improve the accuracy of digital-image cancer screening in order to improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs by launching a series of worldwide big-data analytics prize competitions. In the first C4C prize competition, the “Digital Mammography DREAM Challenge,” launching in early spring 2016, Sage Bionetworks and the open science DREAM Challenge community will make available up to $1.2 million in cash prizes. This competition seeks to improve the accuracy of breast cancer detection and reduce the current rate of patient callbacks. Challenge data will be contributed by Group Health Research Institute through the NCI-funded Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium and by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In the second C4C prize competition, which is launching in spring 2016, the FNIH and the NCI Cancer Imaging Program will also make available up to $1.8 million in cash prizes to improve the accuracy of predicting the presence of lung cancer using CT image data from screening studies. Both C4C Challenges will place all competition results into the public domain, with the algorithms made available to researchers and for commercialization.

ViiV Healthcare is announcing its first prize in the area of HIV and global health, focused on expanding access to health care in rural and other limited resource settings. ViiV Healthcare is announcing plans to launch the first Positive Action Prizes in 2015 designed to address obstacles in connecting people with health clinics in resource-limited settings. The prize will focus on solutions in overcoming the challenges of distance, transport availability, and time in accessing health services in the developing world.  The program is expected to award its first Prize Challenges of up to $300,000 with potential further commitments of up to $3 million over the next 5 years. ViiV also plans, with the support of partners, to launch three to four Positive Action Prizes a year on key challenges in health in international development.

Protecting our Environment

The Alliance for Coastal Technologies (ACT) is launching the next phase of its efforts to develop next-generation nutrient sensors. ACT is announcing today that they are accepting applications for independent verification testing that will take part in its Nutrient Sensor Challenge. Current methods for detecting and measuring nutrients do not capture nutrient complexity and are expensive. Under the challenge, which was created by the Challenging Nutrients Coalition, the goal is for new, more accurate and precise technologies to be commercially available by 2017 for a purchase price of less than $5,000 and with other significant savings in cost-of-ownership.

Context Partners is partnering with the Global Island Partnership to launch the Island Resilience Initiative, and also releasing 20 new prize concepts to combat climate change. In response to the catastrophic impact of climate change on island communities, leaders from island nations around the world, including the Seychelles, Palau, and Grenada, are making commitments to build resilient and sustainable island communities under the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA) network. Together with GLISPA, Context Partners will launch the Island Resilience Initiative (IRI) at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris this December. IRI will create a pipeline of investment-ready projects at the water-energy-food nexus through a three-year prize challenge beginning in 2016. GLISPA will mobilize $9 million in funding from private, philanthropic, and government partners to support the first round of the IRI, including prize-challenge execution, establishment of the Island Resilience Network of prize finalists and projects, and early implementation of infrastructure. This preliminary investment will then be used to leverage up to $250 million by 2020. Also today, Context Partners, in partnership with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, is releasing 20 prize concepts to the international community providing new ways to combat climate change, ranging from tackling methane super emitters and scope 3 emissions, working towards carbon-neutral cities, and realizing citizen-driven visions of a clean-energy future.  

The Everglades Foundation is announcing $1.2 million more in prizes for its phosphorus competition. The George Barley Prize, announced in September 2014, seeks innovative technologies that remove and recover excess phosphorus from freshwater bodies. Today, the Everglades Foundation is announcing $1.2 million more in prizes, bringing the total purse to $11.2 million for its six-year competition. The first three years of the competition include three stepping-stone prizes worth $5,000 to $200,000. The first two prizes enable entrants to test technologies at lab scale and compare performance under similar operating conditions. The third stepping-stone prize enables entrants to test technologies for three months at pilot scale to demonstrate a proof-of-concept that guides full-scale implementation. The top competitors will compete for the $10 million grand prize. The George Barley Prize is designed to attract more than 300 applicants from over 10 countries and benefit over 100,000 miles of freshwater bodies.

OpenIDEO is launching “Accelerate: Innovation for the Planet” to support innovation related to climate change and sustainability. This month, OpenIDEO will launch “Accelerate,” a three-year program dedicated to supporting sustainability and climate innovation. OpenIDEO will run a series of 10 challenges over three years to spark collaborative problem-solving on a range of sustainability topics. Challenges will be complemented by offline events in cities all over the world, new collaborative technology to help climate innovators connect, and digital educational experiences. The Accelerate program and its partners will also provide support for promising ideas and organizations, including design-thinking trainings and workshops, dedicated IDEO design-consulting teams, crowdfunding resources, and implementation funding. Accelerate will be launching this October with Climate Narratives, a call for the global OpenIDEO community to share powerful stories that highlight people and projects making a difference in the climate sector. OpenIDEO is an online platform for open innovation developed by IDEO, the global design and innovation firm. Since 2010, OpenIDEO has run 32 challenges on topics like refugee education, youth employment, and Ebola.

Expanding Opportunity around the World

MetLife Foundation is launching the Global Financial Access Challenge. MetLife Foundation is announcing a global competition to help improve financial inclusion for the estimated 2.6 billion people lacking access to basic financial services. The three-year Financial Access Challenge will operate as a series of country-based competitions in at least 10 countries and eight languages. MetLife Foundation has contracted with Verb to run its Financial Access Challenge. The competition will enable ventures to pitch their business and social impact models and win mentorship from experienced MetLife executives. Verb anticipates the Financial Access Challenge will attract more than 1,000 social ventures globally and engage MetLife staff from a dozen or more countries as mentors and judges, contributing hundreds of volunteer hours. Additionally, the Financial Access Challenge expects to build an online community of over 30,000 people.

The New York Academy of Sciences is announcing new challenges for students around the world. The Global STEM Alliance, led by the New York Academy of Sciences, is expanding its efforts to engage students around the world in new innovation challenges. The Imagining Tomorrow program will launch two new challenges in the spring of 2016, open to students ages 13-19 who are enrolled in the Junior Academy of the Global STEM Alliance. The two challenges will focus on future technological implications of food loss and waste, and of wearable technologies for monitoring personal health. Imagining Tomorrow will also connect students from around the world to relevant STEM mentors both before and during the 60-day challenge period.

Partnership for Freedom is announcing new prizes for innovative technologies to identify and address labor trafficking. The Partnership for Freedom will launch the Rethink Supply Chains Challenge in October 2015. The Challenge calls for innovative technologies to identify and address labor trafficking in global supply chains for goods and services. Innovators are invited to submit entries that help businesses, workers, governments, and NGOs better understand where trafficking occurs in supply chains and track and respond to labor violations, elevate the voices of workers, and improve accountability in foreign labor recruitment. Prizes worth up to $500,000 will be awarded to finalists and winners. The Partnership for Freedom is led by Humanity United in collaboration with the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Private efforts are supported by the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative and the Righteous Persons Foundation.

Addressing a Range of Additional Societal Challenges

ideas42 is announcing plans for a new Student Civic Learning Challenge. Today, ideas42, a non-profit behavioral design lab, is announcing plans to create a national Student Civic Learning Challenge. The Challenge will invite at least 100 campuses to develop and implement innovations to accelerate student civic learning and make civic learning efforts more data-driven. Increases in student civic participation rates will also be used to measure change in campus educational culture. ideas42, along with the Foundation for Civic Leadership, will be recruiting partners to engage in completing the design development, and the first iteration of the Challenge is expected to launch in 2016. 

MITRE is announcing a new prize to study micro-drones in urban environments. The MITRE Corporation is announcing a challenge competition aimed at safely managing micro-drones in an urban environment. Micro-drones are rapidly proliferating, with potential for safety and security concerns. MITRE’s challenge consists of a two-stage process that enables MITRE to identify and evaluate a variety of approaches. For the first phase of the challenge, teams will submit white papers describing their planned technical approach. MITRE will invite the strongest entries to advance to the second stage, during which participants will demonstrate their systems in interaction with actual flying micro-drones in a controlled model urban environment. Multiple drones will be launched around a simulated protected area. Participating teams will have to accurately identify the drone based on flight trajectories, and safely interdict them in a timely manner. The top teams will share a $100,000 prize.

Expanding the Capability for Prize Designers to find one another

The GovLab and MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance will launch an expert network for prizes and challenges. The Governance Lab (GovLab) and MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance will develop and launch the Network of Innovators (NoI) expert networking platform. NoI will make easily searchable the know-how of innovators on topics ranging from developing prize-backed challenges, opening up data, and use of crowdsourcing for public good. Platform users will answer questions about their skills and experiences, creating a profile that enables them to be matched to those with complementary knowledge to enable mutual support and learning. A beta version for user testing within the Federal prize community will launch in early October, with a full launch at the end of October. NoI will be open to civil servants around the world.