Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
Various thinkers, including but not limited to Daren Brabham, Beth Noveck, and Helene Landemore, have each presented their own definitions of what crowdsourcing as a whole, and government crowdsourcing by extension, necessarily entails, but there has been no consensus thus far.Aitamurto, Tanja; Landemore, Helene (2016). "Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland". p. 174 Policy Studies Organization. Governments which have adopted crowdsourcing as a method of information gathering, policy guidance, and in some cases a vital part of the lawmaking process include Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Egypt, Tunisia, and the United States, among many others.
Precursors to government crowdsourcing Though, in the past, direct democracy employed many of the same mechanisms as government crowdsourcing, and indeed could resemble it at times, the objectives direct democracy tended to pursue and the methods it used set it apart. Crowdsourcing requires a specific goal, rewards to be gained by both the crowd and the government, and an open request for anyone to participate, as well as to be conducted through the internet or some other IT medium. Programs which truly resembled pre-Internet government crowdsourcing did not emerge until the 17th and 18th centuries. These were government-sponsored competitions such as the Alkali prize, which lead to the development of the Leblanc Process, and the Longitude Prize.
Other early precursors to government crowdsourcing either followed the same model of reaching out in search of an expert or inventor capable of solving the problem at hand, via what Brabham refers to as the "broadcast-search model". The American government distributed large tasks, such as mapping wind and current patterns along trade routes among American sailors, delegating the discovery of existing knowledge to a crowd in a model similar to what is now referred to as "distributed human intelligence tasking".(Hern, Chester G.(2002). Tracks in the Sea, p. 123 & 246. McGraw Hill. .)
Finally, the French Cahiers de doléances were the most directly governmental example of pre-internet government crowdsourcing. In the lead up to the French Revolution, the three estates listed their grievances and made suggestions to improve the government."Cahiers De Doléances." The French Revolution: A Document Collection. Ed. Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 54–58. Print. These problems, complaints, and proposals were considered and debated through the sessions of the Estates general.Kagan, Donald "The Western Heritage-Seventh Edition" (Pg 631), 2001 Similar efforts to hear the grievances and suggestions of subjects, and later constituents, can be seen at the heart of various political institutions around the world, such as town halls in the United States, petitions in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Modern government crowdsourcing Today, government crowdsourcing follows similar models, albeit utilizing the internet, mobile phones and other IT mediums. Around the world, governments continue to use competitions, delegate large tasks, and reach out to their constituents for feedback both on specific bills and for guidance on various policies. They have also begun, in countries as different as Brazil, British Columbia, and Finland, to not only draw feedback, expertise, and ideas from the crowd, but also specific provisions and wordings for legislation and even constitutions. These initiatives, which give participating constituents greater leeway to both develop their ideas, deliberate, and be heard, mirroring what Brabham describes as "peer-vetted creative crowdsourcing".
The established models persist, but attempts at crowd law and crowdsourced constitutions have met with mixed results. In some cases, the crowdsourcing platform has been purely suggestive, as in British Columbia, and their proposal ultimately put to a vote. Generally, once those crowdsourced suggestions entered the political system, they were either voted down or buried under mountains of procedural delay. In other rarer cases, the efforts succeeded and the crowdsourced laws were adopted, though in somewhat amended form, as happened with the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights and in the Constitutional Convention (Ireland). Other efforts to crowdsource government are still in process, or have only been tested on a limited scale, leaving their long-term results still uncertain.
In several post-revolutionary moments, notably those of Tunisia, Iceland, and Egypt, the new governments have also used crowdsourcing as a means of securing legitimacy and addressing the issues which brought them into power in the first place. This method of constitution making has been met with a limited level of success. The Icelandic constitution, crowdsourced in the aftermath of the 2009 Icelandic financial crisis protests, utilized a multi-layered crowdsourcing structure, with an elected council at the top synthesizing suggestions into the new constitution, a popular forum for the crowd to make their voiced heard, and a Constitutional committee to organize the other parts. By contrast, the Egyptian and Tunisian constitutional processes involved the crowd much less, with an official constitutional assembly composed of traditional political elites who simply received feedback on their draft clauses online.
Defining government crowdsourcing Today, there is still no definitive definition of crowdsourcing, and even less agreement as to what aspects of participatory democracy fit under that description. Most academics and writers tend to create their own definitions. The most expansive definition of crowdsourcing, drawn from a survey of thousands of papers on the topic, describes it as something for which: (a) there is a clearly defined crowd; (b) there exists a task with a clear goal; (c) the recompense received by the crowd is clear; (d) the crowd-sourcer is clearly identified; (e) the compensation to be received by the crowd-sourcer is clearly defined; (f) it is an online assigned process of participative type; (g) it uses an open call of variable extent; (h) it uses the internet
Other definitions are less exhaustive and more case-specific. Helene Landemore, following a similar line of thought as Brabham, defines crowdsourcing as an online problem-solving and production model in which an undefined crowd helps to complete a task by submitting knowledge, information, or talent. In its unrefined form, there is no accountability mechanism, and the crowd, unlike contractors in an outsourcing system, is not vetted. She further distinguishes it from Wikipedia-esque "commons-based peer production", noting that crowdsourcing generally takes the form of individuals commenting and making suggestions in a vacuum as opposed to deliberating, discussing, and collaborating with one another.Brabham, Daren (2013). Crowdsourcing (PDF). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 35Landemore, Helene (2015). "Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment". The Journal of Political Philosophy.
Brahbam also makes a subtle distinction, which makes his definition substantially more restrictive. For an aspect of participatory government to be crowdsourcing, it cannot be purely a government-driven sequence of responses from the crowd. Both sides must engage in direction and deliberation on the project.Brabham, Daren (2013). Crowdsourcing (PDF). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 44–50 Under this definition, certain elements of governmental participation, such as the Peer to Patent project are not crowdsourcing at all, but rather similar processes which have been agglomerated under a new and trendy name.
Mabhoudi, on the other hand, defines it purely in terms of constitution making. His conception of crowdsourcing consists of posting a draft constitution online, utilizing both official websites and social media pages. Those platforms were used for feedback, commentary, recommendations, and possibly final approval. Left out of his definition, but noted in his description of the process of Egyptian constitution making is the use of committees to document, digest, and synthesize the volumes of online feedback into a more readable form, which served an indispensable role in the success, however temporary, of the crowdsourcing process.Maboudi, Tofigh (2016). "Crowdsourcing the Egyptian Constitution: Social Media, Elites, and the Populace". Political Research Quarterly. 69 (4): 716–731
Noveck refers to government crowdsourcing as "collaborative democracy".Noveck, Beth (2009). Wiki-Government: How Technology Can. Make Government Better, Democracy. Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Brookings. p. 17 She defines that as a process of using technology to improve government outcomes by soliciting experience from groups of self-selected peers working together in groups of open networks. Her version of government crowdsourcing more closely resembles the government competitions of the 17th and 18th centuries, or Amazon's Mechanical Turk, than the more participatory model favored by other thinkers.Noveck, Beth (2009). Wiki-Government: How Technology Can. Make Government Better, Democracy. Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Brookings. p. 71 That is, crowds gathered to work on an agenda set out by the government, pooling their diverse expertise to cover every possible field of information.
Examples of government crowdsourcing United States Federal Government
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