Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector

Daren C. Brabham

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626162228
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Affari pubblici e amministrazione

Crowdsourcing is a term that was coined in 2006 to describe how the commercial sector was beginning to outsource problems or tasks to the public through an open call for solutions over the internet or social media. Crowdsourcing works to generate new ideas or develop innovative solutions to problems by drawing on the wisdom of the many rather than the few. US local government experimented with rudimentary crowdsourcing strategies as early as 1989, but in the last few years local, state, and federal government have increasingly turned to crowdsourcing to enhance citizen participation in problem solving, setting priorities, and decision making. While crowdsourcing in the public sector holds much promise and is part of a larger movement toward more citizen participation in democratic government, many challenges, especially legal and ethical issues, need to be addressed to successfully adapt it for use in the public sector.

Daren C. Brabham has been at the forefront of the academic study of crowdsourcing. This book includes extensive interviews with public and private sector managers who have used crowdsourcing. Brabham concludes with a list of the top ten best practices for public managers.

1

Crowdsourcing’s Conceptual Foundations

A FAMILIARITY with the conceptual foundations of crowdsourcing leads to a more nuanced understanding of how crowdsourcing can work in the public sector and when its use is or is not appropriate. This chapter discusses crowdsourcing’s relationship to democratic ideals and the tradition of engagement activities in the public sector, and how crowdsourcing functions as a problem-solving method that draws from the strengths of large and diverse groups. The related concept of crowdfunding and its future in the public sector is also examined.

Because crowdsourcing draws input and insight from individuals in online communities, it has the potential to be a useful digital tool for governance that complements traditional public participation programs.¹ At the most, public participation can be seen as a logical extension of the deliberative democratic process because it engages local citizens in direct and deliberative activities that guide public administrators and planning projects.² At the very least, citizen involvement in the planning process can lead to outcomes that are more widely accepted by future users.³ Tim Bonnemann, the founder of the California-based crowdsourcing consulting firm Intellitics, sums up the rationale for government agencies to conduct meaningful public participation processes:

Making wrong decisions, making bad decisions, making decisions that you can’t sell after the fact because there’s no buy-in is a very expensive way to manage your organization or your community.⁴

It has been argued elsewhere that crowdsourcing, or something like it, “might better fit the shape of democracy in the realities of an increasingly networked information society.”⁵ As society has changed to adapt to new media technologies, so have our expectations for citizen engagement with government. “It is overdue to rethink the legitimacy of attenuated participation in a small number of representative institutions,” argues Beth Noveck, and “democratic theory and the design of governing institutions must be rethought for the age of networks.”⁶ Media theorist Ned Rossiter has also asserted that in an era of “organized networks”—which are, at their core, quite different from merely networked organizations—we ought to focus our energies on “relational processes not representational procedures” and we should “abandon the illusion that the myths of representational democracy might be somehow transferred and realized within networked settings. That is not going to happen.”⁷ This networked existence enables the movement and flow of both ideas and people, as Arjun Appadurai would say.⁸ The Internet is “not simply a specific medium but a kind of active implementation of a design technique able to deal with the openness of systems.”⁹ New media technologies such as the Internet connect people in ways that seem natural and in ways that people expect, that is, closer to one another and seamlessly with organizations and governments. They beckon citizens to participate and create rather than sit idly by and watch their elected representatives fumble through all of the work of governance.

There is a long-standing set of practices in the context of democratic governance (of the representational kind) that are designed to gather public input; these practices have come to be professionalized under the banners of “public participation” or “public engagement.” Gene Rowe and Lynn J. Frewer compiled an extensive list of the mechanisms used for public input and proposed a list of engagement types that categorized these mechanisms according to communication, consultation, and participation purposes.¹⁰ Some of the more traditional public engagement methods that have historically had traction in the public sector include: focus groups, by which a small group of citizens are led by a facilitator to engage at length with a particular set of topics; citizen juries, or groups of citizens who meet and review evidence in order to make decisions and recommendations to government; New England–style town hall meetings, which bring together citizens of a specific locale for public comment, debate, and voting to make decisions on an issue; design charrettes, which are intensive problem-solving workshops attended by a small group of citizens in a compressed time frame; and the Delphi method, which is a technique for achieving consensus among a group through a series of independent questionnaires on a particular issue and often focused on forecasting future scenarios through rounds of feedback that work to converge diverse viewpoints on a common vision.¹¹

These traditional public participation methods come with their own set of hindrances, including the logistical issues related to holding meetings that are maximally inclusive and account for the realities of peer intimidation, interpersonal dynamics, identity and special-interest politics, and facilitators’ influence on meetings.¹² As a mediated alternative that complements traditional participation methods, however, crowdsourcing can ameliorate many of these difficulties while also bringing new insights and innovation to a public problem. An online crowdsourced public engagement activity meets (more) citizens where they are and does not require stilted dialogue in a fluorescent-lit conference room at city hall on a weekday night. Citizens are free to engage at the level at which they feel comfortable and according to their interest in a given issue, to the extent they have time to devote, and whether they have something substantive to contribute. The varying degrees to which one might become involved in a public participation activity have long been thought of as the rungs of a ladder, going from less involved to more involved; more recently it is thought of as a series of concentric circles, like ripples from a rock thrown into a pond, with more involved or affected stakeholders at the “power center” while the apathetic “silent majority” sits at the outer rings.¹³ No matter the analogy, all public participation activities acknowledge the varying degrees of influence exerted by affected stakeholders or a population in which all individuals may not be willing or able to meaningfully engage in solving a problem together. But this has an online parallel within a participatory culture and it is not at all surprising. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen famously coined his 90-9-1 rule, which is to say that in most online activities, 90 percent of the people will observe or remain silent (“lurkers”), 9 percent will occasionally contribute content, and 1 percent will do the lion’s share of the content creation.¹⁴ Research has shown that this distribution turns up many times over across a diverse array of online activities.¹⁵

Indeed, groups of citizens contributing their individual voices together make democracy work. In her research, political scientist Hélène Landemore connects the literature on cognitive diversity in problem solving to the core of democratic self-governance.¹⁶ The concept of cognitive diversity explains why sometimes two heads are better than one or why managers assemble work teams comprised of people from diverse functions in an organization. When solving any problem, each of us brings to the “problem space” or the “task environment” a set of problem-solving heuristics—the shorthand mechanisms or strategies we use to crack tough puzzles.¹⁷ Because every individual has a unique upbringing, a specific viewpoint on the world, and different academic and professional training, every person looks at a problem slightly differently and employs his or her own problem-solving heuristics. Assembling a group of people that is cognitively diverse in this way, then, allows a variety of different methods to be tested on a given problem at the same time. And the larger the group of diverse thinkers, presumably the better. When commenting on the America COMPETES Act (which made it easier for US government entities to use crowdsourcing), Jon Fredrickson, InnoCentive vice president and chief government innovation officer, notes that

the unfortunate part of [America COMPETES]which everybody has discussed is that the award winners—the payments to the winners—can only be made to US citizens or companies with half their revenue in the United States. And that, by definition, limits you to a population of 300 million people or so, out of 7 billion people. I like my odds better if I can ask more folks. I’d like to add the other 6.7 billion people to the mix, but who’s counting, right?¹⁸

Building on his work with Lu Hong, Scott E. Page makes an elegant and accessible case for understanding cognitive diversity in problem-solving teams in his book The Difference.¹⁹ James Surowiecki’s book on the subject, The Wisdom of Crowds, popularized these and related concepts and extends an even older vision for collective intelligence that cultural theorists, media critics, and computer scientists speculated would be brought about through the rise of networks.²⁰ Landemore argues that “democracy is a good collective decision-making procedure because, among other things and all things equal otherwise, it maximizes our collective chances to make the right choices.”²¹ This phenomenon—the good result coming from many people with diverse points of view working together to forge consensus on public decisions—Landemore simply calls “democratic reason.”

One of the most notable advantages to online processes like crowdsourcing is that such processes attract different demographics and add more and varied voices to a conversation about policy and public planning issues that have historically been the prerogative of older citizens able to attend face-to-face public meetings. Surely many people are still without regular access to the Internet and may never choose to participate online even given the technical means to do so. The digital divide persists in the United States and abroad, and no crowdsourcing activity should exist in isolation, even though the broad usage of smart phones in the United States may bridge some of the most long-standing divides.²² Paul Starr warns that “even though the digital divide has narrowed, any reliance of government on digital technology will put people with less income and education at an inequitable disadvantage because of persistent differences in digital skill as well as access.”²³ Crowdsourcing—or any online public sector engagement process—should be seen as a complementary channel to more traditional face-to-face activities.²⁴ What online processes do add, however, is a more youthful voice to a typically older demographic. Mark Walerysiak, the project manager for successful crowdsourced city planning project Bristol Rising in Bristol, Connecticut, explains that town leaders “didn’t want to miss the older generation that may not be on Facebook or be social media savvy,” so in addition to a big uptick in participants through social media and on the project website, they “included in-person monthly meet-ups.” Walerysiak goes on:

We’re trying to get all over the place. We do in-person meet-ups every month where we get consistently thirty people out every time engaging in the process and talking about how we can attract more attention to downtown through events and initiatives.… As far as demo[graphic]s go, the demos are way more balanced than a town hall meeting. We’re pretty representative of what this public is—a microcosm of it, really. Initially our membership was a little bit older—I would say [people in their] forties, maybe fifties—joining the website, and I think that was just strictly because those are the folks who read the local newspaper [where it was advertised], which no young person reads by the way, around here at least. So it was a little bit older because they are the ones who follow city processes and things like that. But over time, that started really leveling out a bit with younger people getting involved from the online standpoint especially. Our [in-person] meet-ups are mostly more like [people in their] thirties and forties, with a smattering of a couple of younger people. I would say the younger folks are more comfortable behind the computer and the older folks like to get out and in front of people. If I had to break it down, I’d say at least half of our demos are probably in their late thirties, probably closer to sixty-something percent. And then the younger group is less than that.²⁵

Likewise, the Next Stop Design project reported a turnout that was more racially and ethnically diverse and much younger than had normally attended traditional face-to-face city planning meetings, with more than half of the participants under the age of thirty.²⁶ This group was perceived as an improvement over the typical attendees of face-to-face planning meetings who were older, white, and available on a weekday afternoon.

Crowdsourcing can be a remarkably effective way for tapping large and far-flung groups of citizens for input on a particular problem, while traditional methods of public participation have historically drawn from smaller and more localized groups. For already-formed ideas that simply need financial backing, however, crowdfunding, not crowdsourcing, is a better approach.

A clarification should be made between the concepts of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, which are often conflated. The topic of crowdfunding—in its own right a force to be reckoned with in the public sector—is largely absent here, and for good reason. Though crowdfunding and crowdsourcing share the notion of a “crowd” as the driving force, they are completely different concepts. Crowdfunding is the process by which an organization or individual seeks financial support for a new project from an online community and the community responds by contributing money to help the organization bring that project to market. Whereas crowdsourcing is a blend of top-down managed process and bottom-up open process between an organization and an online community to create new products, develop new ideas or policies, or execute real work, crowdfunding involves simply bringing an already formed idea or product to market through the financial contributions—not the energies and creative talents—of an online community.

Enrique Estellés-Arolas suggests that there are thr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Crowdsourcing and Public Participation
• 1. Crowdsourcing’s Conceptual Foundations
• 2. Deciding If and When to Use Crowdsourcing
• 3. The Planning Phase
• 4. The Implementation Phase
• 5. The Post-Implementation Phase
• Conclusion: The Future of Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Figures and Tables