U.S. Government Taps ChallengePost to Help Launch Open Government Initiatives
Early in his administration, President Obama vowed to open up government with more interactive online initiatives like Recovery.gov. Though some called his early efforts a “significant failure,” …
Context & Ripple Effects
Open government has been a defining promise of the Obama administration since early 2009, when the White House struggled to adapt its campaign-era web savvy to government — a gap that fed criticism, echoed by ReadWriteWeb's sourcing, that early efforts like Recovery.gov amounted to a "significant failure." The move to tap ChallengePost answers that critique with procurement instead of in-house builds.
The hire also lands in a debate that predates the administration itself: back in September 2008, Computerworld asked whether the federal government should be handed over to bloggers, framing participatory web culture as an outside force rather than a bureaucratic competency. Contracting a private challenge platform formalizes exactly that division of labor.
First-order effects
- Federal agencies gain a ready-made challenge-and-prize infrastructure through ChallengePost, letting them run public participation initiatives without building their own platforms — directly addressing the execution shortfall documented since 2009.
- ChallengePost becomes a named federal partner in the open-government portfolio, converting its consumer contest business into government-referenced credibility.
Second-order effects
- Other civic-engagement platform vendors now face a federal buyer that has demonstrated willingness to outsource participation tooling, raising the stakes for comparable government contracts.
- The administration's response to the "significant failure" critique shifts from fixing internal web operations to buying external ones — pressuring agencies to justify in-house development at all.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, American open government consolidates around private intermediaries that host public participation, making platform vendors structural gatekeepers between citizens and agencies rather than mere contractors.
- Procurement of engagement platforms could become a standing category of govtech spending, with contract terms — not agency policy — defining how open federal data and deliberation actually are.
The trend: Government openness is migrating from agency-built websites to outsourced private platforms and prize mechanisms, with vendors like ChallengePost becoming the delivery layer for civic participation.