Crowdsourcing Government: Lessons from Multiple Disciplines

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This review synthesizes prior crowdsourcing research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of crowdsourcing in the public sector. It identifies three distinct categories of crowdsourcing: organizations, products and services, and holistic systems. Lessons about the fundamental logic of process design-alignment, motivation, and evaluation-identified across the three categories are discussed. Conclusions drawn from past studies and the resulting evidence can help public managers better design and implement crowdsourcing in the public sector. Practitioner Points• Crowdsourcing studies in the public sector show that properly designed crowdsourcing platforms can empower citizens, create legitimacy for the government with the people, and enhance the effectiveness of public services and goods. • Research suggests that crowdsourcing decisions should be based on both solutions necessary to resolve public problems and appropriate tasks for participants who have knowledge or skills. • Evidence shows that prizes and rewards can increase participation rates, but opportunities for learning and skill building are essential for enhancing the quality of participants' contributions. • Studies indicate that a crowdsourcing approach empowers participants through peer review by adopting constructive competition and supportive cooperation designs in the review process. • Studies illustrate that the establishment of an effective reputation system in the crowdsourcing process can ensure legitimate evaluation.

Designing Public Participation: Managing Problem Settings and Social Equity

“…Although traditional forms of engagement are still the most common, new forms are emerging as new governance processes increase in practice (Bingham, Nabatchi, and O'Leary ; Lui ). Boyte () writes about the promise of new forms of governance that increase the role of citizens through power sharing, engaging citizens as problem‐solvers and leaders to provide space for civic action, such as participatory advisory panels, educative forums, participatory problem‐solving collaboratives, and participatory democratic governance.…”

Technologies For Construction Of General Communicative Space Of Regional Authorities And Society

“…Crowdsourcing technologies have already been applied in the practice of local authorities in some countries (Sievers, 2015). Thus it is noted that the authorities should approach the organization and implementation of crowdsourcing projects with greater care and pay attention to data security in particular (Liu, 2017).…”

Can the power of platforms be harnessed for governance?

“…First, by constructing interactive arenas for connecting various actors, platforms may allow the public sector to reach and engage citizens and stakeholders in powerful new ways. Crowdsourcing platforms may help to aggregate distributed citizen input (Bott and Young 2012;Brabham 2013;Aitamurto and Chen 2017;Liu 2017;Taeihagh 2017). Participation or deliberation platforms may foster citizen participation in policy deliberation (Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2014;Aitamurto and Landemore 2016;Aragón et al 2017;Garard et al 2018;Sørensen and Torfing 2018;De Blasio and Selva 2019).…”