Kudos to iDiplomacy symposium participant Justin Carroll for the following tip…

With millions of users, startups like Twitter and Facebook have growth and reach that would be the envy of any company. But it’s not just the private sector that can learn from those companies – the federal government can too, and a new organization, the non-partisan Expert Labs, is seeking to do just that.

As Alissa Walker writes Nov. 18 in Fast Company:

During his presentation today at the Web 2.0 conference, Six Apart cofounder Anil Dash showed a before-they-were-famous photo that included the founders of Twitter, Flickr, and other well-known startups. They’ve learned plenty of lessons as Web 2.0 companies, he said. “What if we could bring these lessons to bear in service of our country?”

To that end, Dash has established a new non-profit, nonpartisan incubator named Expert Labs that will launch a series of experiments with the goal of bridging government policy and technology. The incubator will give grants to tech gurus to develop applications and tools that benefit both the government and citizens (similar to city-wide open data programs like New York’s Big Apps contest, but on a national basis).

Dash, himself a successful entrepreneur, did not need to be convinced about the government’s potential for embracing technology. In August he wrote on his blog the following on what he viewed as the most interesting new tech startup of 2009:

So, after taking a pretty careful look at the tech scene (and of course with a number of my recent posts being focused on Facebook, Google, Apple and other giants of the tech industry), I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.

Need proof? Well, let’s take a look at some of the most compelling new sites that have launched in just the few short months since President Obama took office:

Data.gov, providing open access to feeds of valuable facts and figures generated by the executive branch.

USAspending.gov, allowing any of us to drill down into the details of spending from various federal agencies.

Recovery.gov, perhaps one of the best-known of the new sites, offering up details of how resources from the Recovery Act are being allocated.

And of course, there’s WhiteHouse.gov. You know about that one…..

So What’s Next?

While it’s exciting to see the remarkable embrace of new technologies that’s coming from inside the beltway, there are still some serious challenges that face the new startup-minded tech community within our government. In many ways, they echo the classic challenges that all startups face, but with a unique twist:

Defining a startup’s culture is extraordinarily difficult, since there have to be clear values that are expressed in the way people act both in public and behind the scenes. In the case of the executive branch, this is doubly hard because it’s redefining a culture which has been well-established for decades. Bringing organizational change and new technologies to an established way of working requires partners and suppliers to change the way they do business, as well.

Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn’t have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience. And of course, nobody works in government for the salaries. Fortunately, all of us who are citizens already have equity in this startup.

Marketing has never been the strong suit of those doing the most interesting work in the government sphere. Even some of the smarter folks I know in the tech world had never even heard of the sites I mentioned above, or had never bothered to check them out in much detail. It’s going to take concerted effort to get the word out beyond the usual circle of those who were already interested in technology and government.

Expert Labs is run as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science, and is also funded by the MacArthur Foundation. It is very explicit about what it hopes to accomplish, with the following on its homepage:

We Know The Experts Are Out There.

Expert Labs is a new independent initiative to help policy makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens. How does it work? Simple:

We ask policy makers what questions they need answered to make better decisions.

We help the technology community create the tools that will get those answers.

We prompt the scientific & research communities to provide the answers that will make our country run better.

Each community provides its own unique expertise. And the end result is a government that uses the web not just to talk to citizens, but to listen to them.

Appropriately for an organization that seeks entrepreneurial buy-in, Expert Labs is going to be running grant contests to provide funding for new technology. (In an earlier post we talked about the X Games’ ability to leverage a $10 million prize into $100 million worth of private investment).

Interested in learning more? You can subscribe to updates on the Expert Labs homepage or follow them on Twitter.