The GovLab is the “governance lab” at New York University (NYU). Founded and directed by Beth Simone Noveck, it aims to “improve people’s lives by changing how we govern” and “seeking new ways to solve public problems using advances in technology and science”.
From their about page:
Innovations in technology and science are empowering individuals to engage with one another – and with traditional institutions of governance – to tackle problems more collaboratively, and drive progress more rapidly than ever before. Through collection, computation and visualization of large-scale data sets, we can make better informed decisions. We can use new methods for generating ideas from more people in response to wicked challenges. New insights from social and behavioral research are teaching us how to use tools like prizes, games, challenges and “nudges” to create incentives for engagement. We are developing social machines – collaboration platforms – for organizing work at a distance so we can solve problems more democratically.
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GovLab operates as a network of networks. Housed at New York University and funded by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the GovLab encompasses two major initiatives: GovLab Research and GovLab Academy.
Among many other interesting projects, GovLab runs Living Labs, which aims to “combine solving real world problems with rigorous research”. From the site:
Our Hypothesis
We believe that when institutions open themselves to diverse participation and collaborative problem solving, those institutions are more effective and the decisions they make are more legitimate.
How We Work
The Living Labs convene leaders of institutions and communities who want to implement more open and collaborative decision-making, and bring them together with researchers who want to study those projects and their real-world impact. We work with an international network of advisors to design our projects and develop experiments for evaluating them. We always work with at least two institutional partners to ensure that results inform a more general blueprint for opening government.
We briefly covered their GovLab Experiment event last Spring on “Making Engagement Work”.
The GovLab blog has quickly become a high-volume (and high-quality) source of open government and government innovation news.
Follow @thegovlab on Twitter.
