Crowdsourced Policymaking

The aim of this research is to explore the use of crowdsourcing especially from business-to-business companies" innovation perspective, and to create a more comprehensive picture of the possibilities of crowdsourcing for companies operating in business-to-business markets. Business-to-business context was chosen because it is in many ways a very different environment for crowdsourcing than business-to-consumer context, and we found no academic studies on the topic. A systematic literature review was performed to gain an understanding of the state-ofthe-art, and to create a research framework on the concept of crowdsourcing in innovation covering e.g. the type of crowdsourcing used, which crowds were used and in what innovation process phase crowds were utilized. Concerning the current ways of using 'crowds' and crowdsourcing in B2B innovation process, we found evidence of using crowdsourcing in B2B"s in all the three innovation process phases: front-end, product development, and commercialization. Furthermore, evidence was found for crowdsourcing to be used in innovation mainly in the manner of crowd creation, crowd wisdom and crowd funding. We found that the role of social media was quite essential in all the found B2B crowdsourcing examples.

Technology has radically shifted human behavior, bringing interconnectedness among people in a way that has never been imagined before. It offers the potential to contribute to cheaper and faster collective problem-solving, in particular, to solve big and laborious tasks that are difficult to execute by a small number of people. This collective action, namely crowdsourcing, has been implemented in many areas such as supporting research activities, public administration, as well as funding social projects. The potential of crowdsourcing can also be leveraged in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The main objective of this paper to identify the prospective impact of crowdsourcing for the SDGs. We have identified 209 crowdsourcing projects across the globe that are closely related to the development sector. We argue that crowdsourcing is a potential tool to monitor and support the SDGs.

Today's generation of biosphere knows well that the requirement of life and existence is nothing but inalienable protection of the inhabited planet and its environment and that extra efforts must be made to maintain it. The issue which the special view towards it has been reflected in the light of sustainable development and has been realized based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. This issue is clearly tackled within two outstanding principles: one is the principle of sovereignty, and the other is the standard of regulation. Although states, through the governance and simple roles in the international arena, should, in compliance with the treaty system, prepare the ground for the adherence and implementation of environmental protection norms, the role of citizens in environmental regulation, as well as realization of the principles of participation and sustainable development, is so vital. This study endeavours to show that, with the involvement of citizens in the regulation process, access and dissemination of information, and implementation of international environmental norms and principles, one can be hopeful for the realization of environmental governance and further support and preservation of the biosphere. This research seeks to make a solid critical analysis of governance and environmental regulation in light of crowdsourcing by utilizing library resources. The question of this study is whether the bilateral interaction of environmental governance and crowdsourcing can lead to the complete realization of environmental protection and regeneration. Nevertheless, based on the principle of necessity, the international community should seek to investigate the dimensions of the usage of crowdsourcing in resolving environmental issues.

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application ofNatural Language Processing(NLP) and machine learning can improve citizens’ experience of digital citizen participation platforms. Taking as a case study the “Decide Madrid” Consul platform, which enables citizens to post proposals for policies they would like to see adopted by the city council, we used NLP and machine learning to provide new ways to (a) suggest to citizens proposals they might wish to support; (b) group citizens by interests so that they can more easily interact with each other; (c) summarise comments posted in response to proposals; a...

This handbook aims to synthesize key ideas from the emerging field of collective intelligence and place them more clearly in the context of public problem-solving. Groups, under certain conditions, can solve problems and accomplish complex tasks in a way that surpasses the abilities of any individual within them. How can we understand this phenomenon, and what are the conditions necessary to bring it about? The notion of collective intelligence is polysemic, informed by disciplines as diverse as conflict mediation and computer science. This poses challenges as well as opportunities: Though our notions of cognition, collaboration, and citizen engagement are enriched by studies from a diversity of fields, there is also a risk that these fields talk past one another or that crucial links go unexplored. Our intent in this handbook of collective intelligence for democracy and governance is to add clarity and coherence to the field of collective intelligence as it matures into a scientific discipline in its own right. The increased salience of the field in recent decades may be correlated with some of the key trends of our time, notably the revolution in digital technology that has enabled new modes of large-scale collaboration (McNutt et al., 2016), the growing complexity and interdependence of public problems (Noveck, 2015), and a crisis of trust in public institutions that has inspired a "wave" of deliberative experiments worldwide (OECD, 2020). The present moment has been described as a transition from the fourth industrial revolution, characterized by the increasing automation and interconnection of economic functions (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014), to an upcoming fifth industrial revolution centered on the need to make organizations and societies more intelligent (Noble, Mende, Grewal et al., 2022). Authors have referred to this new technological paradigm as the "deep minds era," in which deep knowledge is harnessed, and collective consciousness created, from both humans and machines (cf. Friedman, 2019). See further Part 7 of the Handbook on Collective Intelligence, Technology and Collective Consciousness. This fifth industrial revolution encompasses the notion of harmonious human-machine collaborations with a specific focus on the well-being of multiple stakeholders (i.e., society, companies, employees, and customers). For some, this "deep minds era" holds the promise of a revolution in how we learn and think through the leveraging of human-machine

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application of Natural Language Processing ( NLP ) and machine learning can improve citizens’ experience of digital citizen participation platforms. Taking as a case study the “Decide Madrid” Consul platform, which enables citizens to post proposals for policies they would like to see adopted by the city council, we used NLP and machine learning to provide new ways to (a) suggest to citizens proposals they might wish to support; (b) group citizens by interests so that they can more easily interact with each other; (c) summarise comments posted in response to proposal...

While crowdsourcing is an increasingly common method of open-government practices to strengthen participatory democracy, its impact on governance is unclear. Using data from a crowdsourced city-plan update by the City of Palo Alto, California, this article examines the impact of a crowd's input on policy changes. We used an enacted policy change to quantify government's response to crowd suggestions, whether crowd suggestions are adopted in the policy changes or not. While the city responded to less than half of the crowd's suggestions, the likelihood of its doing so increased by 51.42 percentage points when the crowd's ideas were amplified by a citizen advisory committee (CAC), a panel of residents working with the city in the policy update. We also found that the government is more likely to respond to crowd suggestions that are perceived as actionable. These two factors-CAC and the perceived data quality-constitute a filter which the crowd's suggestions have to pass to make into the policy. This filter created a hierarchy in the participatory practice. Although crowdsourcing intends to create equality and inclusiveness in policymaking, our findings reveal that the civic data overload and the filter hierarchy complicate the adoption of crowdsourcing as a democratic innovation in governance.

While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism and a learning context. Economic value is created when crowdsourcing makes knowledge search in policymaking more efficient and enables government to produce policies that better address citizens' needs and societal issues. We show how these tenets of value creation are manifest in crowdsourced policymaking by drawing on instances of crowdsourced lawmaking, and we also discuss the contingencies and challenges preventing value creation.

O Field Project teve como objetivo explorar o conceito de crowdlaw e investigar o potencial da participação digital cidadã em aprimorar a elaboração e monitoramento das políticas públicas nacionais, seja no processo de elaboração das leis, seja no aprimoramento das políticas de gestão urbana. Durante o projeto, foram investigadas três principais iniciativas de crowdlaw: as plataformas e-Cidadania e e-Democracia, estabelecidas pelo Congresso Nacional, com o objetivo de possibilitar a participação cidadã na elaboração das leis e a plataforma Colab, uma startup que visa permitir uma gestão pública mais colaborativa nas cidades.

While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism and a learning context. Economic value is created when crowdsourcing makes knowledge search in policymaking more efficient and enables government to produce policies that better address citizens' needs and societal issues. We show how these tenets of value creation are manifest in crowdsourced policymaking by drawing on instances of crowdsourced lawmaking, and we also discuss the contingencies and challenges preventing value creation.

Law-making should not exclude citizens. The following paper analyses how citizens" engagement in policymaking fails because of citizens" illiteracy in law and administration knowledge and provides an updated scenario for building common knowledge through discourse production along policy drafting. In a context of a huge appetite for active participation in the decision-making processes, it is of vital importance to collect people"s views and gain their confidence and support. Creating a constant habit from citizen participation is not only bringing added value in law making, but it is also a guarantee that they will meet the needs of citizens and therefore generate public commitment. Although citizens can contribute with their input, they have limited understanding and control over the data they provide and the results, often remaining detached from the very mission and scope of such involvement.

Law-making should not exclude citizens. The following paper analyses how citizens" engagement in policymaking fails because of citizens" illiteracy in law and administration knowledge and provides an updated scenario for building common knowledge through discourse production along policy drafting. In a context of a huge appetite for active participation in the decision-making processes, it is of vital importance to collect people"s views and gain their confidence and support. Creating a constant habit from citizen participation is not only bringing added value in law making, but it is also a guarantee that they will meet the needs of citizens and therefore generate public commitment. Although citizens can contribute with their input, they have limited understanding and control over the data they provide and the results, often remaining detached from the very mission and scope of such involvement.

While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism and a learning context. Economic value is created when crowdsourcing makes knowledge search in policymaking more efficient and enables government to produce policies that better address citizens' needs and societal issues. We show how these tenets of value creation are manifest in crowdsourced policymaking by drawing on instances of crowdsourced lawmaking, and we also discuss the contingencies and challenges preventing value creation.

Collective intelligence is a term used to describe the organization of intelligence at large scale, usually involving digital networks and the aggregation and orchestration of observations, analysis, and problem-solving from large numbers of people.

This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In the crowdsourcing experiment, the public was invited to contribute to the law-reform process by sharing their knowledge and ideas for a better policy. This article introduces a normative design framework of five principles for crowdsourced policymaking: inclusiveness, accountability, transparency, modularity, and synthesis. Inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency are overarching principles for crowdsourced policymaking. Modularity and synthesis support these overarching principles and are instrumental in achieving the main goals of crowdsourced policymaking, namely, an efficient search for knowledge and democratic deliberation among the participants. These principles apply to both the design of the process and the medium that the process takes place in, i.e., the technology facilitating crowdsourcing. This article analyzes the design of the crowdsourced off-road traffic law exper...

This paper reports on a pioneering case study of a legislative process open to the direct online participation of the public. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced off-road traffic law in Finland. On the basis of our analysis of the user content generated to date and a series of interviews with key participants, we argue that the process qualifies as a promising case of deliberation on a mass-scale. This case study will make an important contribution to the understanding of online methods for participatory and deliberative democracy. The preliminary findings indicate that there is deliberation in the crowdsourcing process, which occurs organically (to a certain degree) among the participants, despite the lack of incentives for it. Second, the findings strongly indicate that there is a strong educative element in crowdsourced lawmaking process, as the participants share information and learn from each other. The peer-learning aspect could be made even stronger through the addition of design elements in the process and on the crowdsourcing software.

Law-making should not exclude citizens. The following paper analyses how citizens‟ engagement in policymaking fails because of citizens‟ illiteracy in law and administration knowledge and provides an updated scenario for building common knowledge through discourse production along policy drafting. In a context of a huge appetite for active participation in the decision-making processes, it is of vital importance to collect people‟s views and gain their confidence and support. Creating a constant habit from citizen participation is not only bringing added value in law making, but it is also a guarantee that they will meet the needs of citizens and therefore generate public commitment. Although citizens can contribute with their input, they have limited understanding and control over the data they provide and the results, often remaining detached from the very mission and scope of such involvement.

Law-making should not exclude citizens. The following paper analyses how citizens" engagement in policymaking fails because of citizens" illiteracy in law and administration knowledge and provides an updated scenario for building common knowledge through discourse production along policy drafting. In a context of a huge appetite for active participation in the decision-making processes, it is of vital importance to collect people"s views and gain their confidence and support. Creating a constant habit from citizen participation is not only bringing added value in law making, but it is also a guarantee that they will meet the needs of citizens and therefore generate public commitment. Although citizens can contribute with their input, they have limited understanding and control over the data they provide and the results, often remaining detached from the very mission and scope of such involvement.

This article examines the recent legislative process concerning the funding of cultural institutions in Finland. The drafting of the bill was opened up to participation by artists and other professionals and facilitated by an out- side partner. The text draws on research conducted to evaluate the participatory element in the law-drafting, and further analyses it in the wider framework of participatory decision-making and governance. The research shows that within the confined scope of the participatory phase of the law-drafting, the deliberative process succeeded in creating positive experiences of participation. However, set in the wider framework of the legislation, the effect of participation remains limited. A notion of ‘placebo participation’ is suggested to explain this perceived empowerment despite a lack of strong evidence for effective participation. The process is further interpreted in terms of incompatibility of interests between political parti- cipation and institutionally led participatory governance.
If you want to cite this, please refer to the published article  https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2019.1656202

This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term " crowdsourced deliberation " to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on " deliberative systems. "

Over the past decade, crowdfunding has emerged as a legitimate, albeit niche, resource for public service delivery. Predicated on utilizing the resources of the crowd to address public issues, civic crowdfunding has the potential to offer citizens a greater role in service delivery and community development. This study investigates community dynamics and their potential impact on project success in jurisdictions proposing civic crowdfunding proposals. The results highlight the dynamics and characteristics of communities where project proposals are likely to find funding success. The results further highlight several potential opportunities for future research to better understand how and why these projects truly work.

What are the similarities and differences between crowdsourcing and sharing economy? What factors influence their use in developing countries? In light of recent developments in the use of IT-mediated technologies, such as crowdsourcing and the sharing economy, this manuscript examines their similarities and differences, and the challenges regarding their effective use in developing countries. We first examine each individually and highlight different forms of each IT-mediated technology. Given that crowdsourcing and sharing economy share aspects such as the use of IT, a reliance on crowds, monetary exchange, and the use of reputation systems, we systematically compare the similarities and differences of different types of crowdsourcing with the sharing economy, thus addressing a gap in the current literature. Using this knowledge, we examine the different challenges faced by developing countries when using crowdsourcing and the sharing economy, and highlight the differences in the applicability of these IT-mediated technologies when faced with specific development issues.

While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism and a learning context. Economic value is created when crowdsourcing makes knowledge search in policymaking more efficient and enables government to produce policies that better address citizens’ needs and societal issues. We show how these tenets of value creation are manifest in crowdsourced policymaking by drawing on instances of crowdsourced lawmaking, and we also discuss the contingencies and challenges preventing value creation.

While crowdsourced democratic deliberation is becoming more common in open policymaking, it remains unclear what its value and role is — and should be, and could be — in policymaking. This paper examines crowdsourced democratic deliberation and its features, comparing it to the traditional mini-publics approach in democratic deliberation and to general online deliberation. The paper shows the promise of crowdsourced democratic deliberation as a method for scaling up deliberation to masses, while also illuminating its challenges, rooted in the self-selected and distributed nature of crowdsourcing. The paper concludes that the value of crowdsourced democratic deliberation remains mainly procedural rather than instrumental in policymaking.

This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term " crowdsourced deliberation " to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on " deliberative systems. "

In addition to providing large-scale, highly available computational resources, clouds also enable a new methodology for software development via crowdsourcing, in which crowd participants either collaborate or compete to contribute software. Using a crowd to develop software is predicted to take its place alongside established methodologies, such as agile, scrum, pair programming, service-oriented computing, and the traditional waterfall.

This paper shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence – cognitive diversity and large crowds – turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowd’s logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of those: In traditional
policymaking it is a small group of experts making proposals to the policy, whereas in crowdsourced policymaking, it is a large, anonymous crowd with a
mixed level of expertise. The crowd proposes atomic ideas, whereas traditional policymaking is used to dealing with holistic and synthesized proposals. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice. The conflict prevents policymaking fully benefiting from the crowd’s input, and it also hinders governments from adopting crowdsourcing more widely as a practice for deploying open policymaking practices.

Public involvement is a central concern for urban planners, but the challenge for planners is how best to implement such programs, given many difficulties inherent in the typical public involvement process. The medium of the Web enables us to harness collective intellect among a population in ways face-to-face planning meetings cannot. This article argues that the crowdsourcing model, a successful, Web-based, distributed problem solving and production model for business, is an appropriate model for enabling the citizen participation process in public planning projects. This article begins with an exploration of the challenges of public participation in urban planning projects, particularly in the harnessing of creative solutions. An explanation of the theories of collective intelligence and crowd wisdom follows, arguing for the medium of the Web as an appropriate technology for harnessing far-flung genius. An exploration of crowdsourcing in a hypothetical neighborhood planning example, along with a consideration of the challenges of implementing crowdsourcing, concludes the article. Now that we can do anything, what will we do? (Mau, 2004: 15) Like Bruce Mau, and like Buckminster Fuller before him, I believe we live in a world capable of designing the solutions to the world's many problems, to implement our imagined paths to peace, sustainability, and abundance.

Is the digital the medium par excellence of open crowds? Unencumbered by material boundaries, digital crowds have been increasingly mobilised in new digital economies and political spaces. For some, digital crowds and ' crowdsourcing' harbour the promise of democratising science, increasing participation in politics and new economies of value. In their digital form, crowds appear to embody collective intelligence, which can be harnessed to the creation of surplus value. The 'wisdom of crowds' (Surowiecki 2005) is celebrated in economic analysis and hailed as enriching digital worlds. Digital crowds are collectively intelligent exactly because they are dispersed and harbour the promise of unlimited growth. New knowledge is therefore hidden in them, and crowds provide answers where other means fail. The digital crowd could not be further away from le Bon's postulations on the 'unconscious and brutal crowds' [1895) or the more recent rationalisations of crowd behaviour. It is exactly the chaos in the crowd, its dispersion, its storage of local hidden knowledge, its range of perspectives and even its emotional charge, which excites and can produce digital value. Crowdsourcing has become the economic model for how to access and deploy crowd power for economic profit (see for instance Dawson and Bynghall 2012). For others, the promise of digital ecosystems to integrate dispersed digital crowds into a global workforce is effectively a promise of exploitation and precarious working conditions (Blanke 2014, Scholtz 2013).

By analysing the Finnish independent Open Ministry project, which aims to crowdsource the drafting of Finnish citizen initiatives to the Finnish public, this dissertation sets out to provide a detailed overview of a new method, through which the public can engage with their government in a more direct way. By analysing the Finnish Open Ministry project, this dissertation tries also to assess the general effectiveness of third sector crowdsourcing platforms in the public policy process. This study embarks on an assessment of the classification of the Open Ministry platform in the context of existing crowdsourcing practices, and continues to analyse its claim as method for deepening Finnish democracy by assessing the platforms success and looking at factors relating to its design, implementation, impact and viability. The dissertation finds that Open Ministry is set up in a digital-friendly environment that fosters its growth towards a potential medium through which citizens can influence national policies. Through the analysis emerge aspects that play a key role in the project's success such as public perception towards digital democracy and deliberation, history of government to citizen interaction, the adaptability of national law, and technological infrastructure. The paper argues that the Open Ministry project is a verbatim example of a successful crowdsourced policy generation platform and recommends that further research should be done comparing it with other similar projects that have gained momentum around the world.

Can Crowdsourcing be used for policy? Previous work posits that the three types of Crowdsourcing have different levels of potential usefulness when applied to the various stages of the policy cycle. In this paper, we build upon this exploratory work by categorizing the extant research with respect to Crowdsourcing for the policy cycle. Premised upon our analysis, we thereafter discuss the trends, highlight the gaps, and suggest some approaches to empirically validate the application of Crowdsourcing to the policy cycle.

This book illuminates the role of crowdsourcing in policy-making By drawing on several cases around the world. From crowdsourced constitution reform in Iceland and participatory budgeting in Canada, to open innovation for services and crowdsourced federal strategy process in the United States, the book analyzes the impact of crowdsourcing on citizen agency in the public sphere. It also serves as a handbook with practical advice for successful crowdsourcing in a variety of public domains.

The author, Tanja Aitamurto, is a visiting researcher at the Liberation
Technology Program at Stanford University. She examines
how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing,
co-creation or open innovation, impacts processes in journalism,
public policy-making and design. This book is based on a report
she delivered to the Parliament of Finland about crowdsourcing
for democratic processes.