What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative tradeoffs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policy making? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative trade-offs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy, and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

Based on a client project assigned to students in two undergraduate business classes, this article argues that social media learning is best done in a context that mixes social media with more traditional kinds of media. Ideally, this approach will involve teams of students who are working on different aspects of a larger client project. This integrated setup has several benefits: It enhances the students' understanding of social media within a real context, it complements more traditional communication methods, and it reveals the communicative aspects of key business functions.

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