Crowdsourcing and the National Suggestion Box

Crowdsourcing is the term given to the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas (hence the National Suggestion Box), or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

The National Suggestion Box is an on line “box” created in 2009 to give government workers a place to contribute budget cutting ideas (using crowdsourcing as a strategy, I like it!). Four ideas each year are selected for implementation and awarded the SAVE Award. In all the 28 suggestions implemented so far have brought savings of 243 million dollars per year, other suggestions have been less impressive and still others have had no fiscal impact at all.

85,933 of the 86,000 ideas suggested have yet to be acted upon for a variety of reasons I am sure, including the fact that it would be more work than just allowing sequestration to rear its ugly head. It’s interesting to consider how crowdsourcing works and funny how the government works at the same time. I kind of liked the ideas about having boy scouts wash government cars for (low pay and) merit badges and saving on landscaping fees by using government goats.