Case Study: Innovate Your State achieves crowdsourced policy wins and increased government transparency with IdeaScale

Innovate Your State Making Government Innovative and Accountablea

Innovate Your State is a nonprofit that mobilizes public participation to improve government. To bridge the gap between innovation and government, it ran the Fix California Challenge on the IdeaScale platform, asking citizens to submit ideas aligned with six guiding principles (transformation, representation, education, accountability, opportunity, renewal). The challenge was promoted through media, social channels, partner networks and events, and drew hundreds of submissions during a three-month period.

Using moderator tagging and a staged review process that narrowed over 450 submissions to a short list of finalists, Innovate Your State funded and encouraged several solutions for implementation — from a county restructuring concept to grants for OpenGov and civic platforms like PlaceAVote. One crowdsourced proposal, Proposition 54 (legislative transparency), made the 2016 ballot and passed handily (about 64.9%), demonstrating the program’s ability to surface actionable, statewide reforms and paving the way for similar efforts in other states.

Innovate Your State

Tim Draper

Founder