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News Analysis
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On 1 March 2010, the U.S. Army announced a programming contest called Apps for the Army (A4A) with a prize money pool of $30,000. Submissions are due 15 May 2010. The registration form, rules and instructions are located at the Apps for the Army website: www.army.mil/ciog6/armyapps.
Because all Army personnel, even nontechnical, may participate in the A4A initiative, “citizen developers” could potentially bring tacit knowledge and important functional areas to bear in their solutions. These "outsiders" will likely bring a fresh perspective to familiar and perhaps somewhat tired legacy information systems. The A4A initiative adds its own spin to previous public "crowdsourcing" projects and internal programming contests. The latter are the Silicon Valley equivalent of the strategic off-site or retreat, where staff members bond with one another while engaging in activities disruptive to their usual daily routines that often offer new insights into old problems. Programming contests can result in working code and useful programs that later become products. For example, Facebook, Google and Yahoo are known for "hackathons" in which developers attempt to create innovative applications or add features to existing applications in as little as 24 to 48 hours for little more than bragging rights. Large-scale, long-term public crowdsourcing contests offer another successful precedent for the A4A initiative. The three-year-long, $1 million Netflix Prize attracted more than 44,000 submissions from 5,000 teams. The Goldcorp Challenge enticed 1,000 external geology experts to seek a cut of the $575,000 prize attached to finding gold in a seemingly moribund mine. (The recovered gold ended up being worth more than $3 billion.) TopCoder is a contract software development company that regularly conducts algorithm and design contests, with 30,000 total participants. But the closest precedents for A4A are likely recent contests in the government domain, such as Apps for Democracy and Apps dor America, and Apps for Haiti, for disaster relief. The A4A field is limited to the first 100 registrants, presumably because of the judges’ and organizers’ limited resources. The Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), the Defense Information Systems Agency's private cloud computing facility, will host the submissions, which will help market the facility internally and externally. RACE supports both Windows and LAMP platforms, as well as mobile platform emulation for BlackBerry, Android and iPhone. The approximately six-week A4A timeframe is short enough to maintain momentum and long enough to enable participants to build a substantial application with lasting value. The prize money is not distractingly large, but is enough to gain attention and incentivize sustained effort. Many contestants will view fame and respect among Army peers as the real reward.
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Recommendations
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- Consider developer events that can exploit friendly competition to produce a few narrowly scoped, tactical deliverables.
- Lay the groundwork for a successful event by making available lightweight APIs, distilled documentation, and an open attitude for answering questions from citizen developers and "outsiders," some of whom may seem critical.
- Choose leaders who will lead collaborative sessions by their example (such as being the last to leave) and monitor group dynamics closely.
- Emphasize the journey rather than the reward. Temper expectations about lasting, tangible results, and cultivate the benefit of an enhanced team spirit, as well as the opportunity to learn about strategic new technologies.
- Prepare to follow through on results worth building on.
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Recommended Reading
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(You may need to sign in or be a Gartner client to access the documents referenced in this First Take.)
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