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Government Crowdsourcing is a form of Crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage the collective knowledge and experience of their people by tapping into their ability to see connections, understand issues, and coordinate action. 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 referenda, in that is is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.

The increasing embrace of government crowdsourcing, both actual and nominal, has been driven by a demand for greater civic engagement and popular demands for accountability, as well as by the tendency of authors and journalists to use the term "crowdsourcing" to describe various collaborative online process. Whether many recent programs of public involvement, such as ship naming polls, and online structures of participatory democracy, such as online petitions, are forms of government crowdsourcing is still debated today. 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. 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. Each case varies in structure and level of influence granted to involved citizens, ranging from massive crowds providing purely advisory feedback to small randomly selected committees drafting entire pieces of legislation.

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."

Finally, the French Cahiers de doléances were the most directly governmental example of pre-Internet government crowdsourcing. In the leadup to the French Revolution, the three estates listed their grievances and made suggestions to improve the government. These problems, complaints, and proposals were considered and debated through the sessions of the Estates general. 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 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 continue to work as well as they ever did, but attempts at crowdlaw 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 crowdsourcer is clearly identified; (e) the compensation to be received by the crowdsourcer 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 it's 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.

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. Under this definition, certain elements of governmental participation, such as the Peer to Patent project aren't 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.

Noveck refers to government crowdsourcing as "collaborative democracy." 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. That is, crowds gathered to work on an agenda set out by the government, pooling their diverse expertises to cover every possible field of information.

Article Feedback from Si Affron

- I like your first paragraph a lot, as I think it gives a clear description of the theory of government crowdsourcing. However, the second paragraph seems to introduce an empirical or historical section, in which you might expand on the examples that you mention, including Brazil, Finland, etc. I think a third could be useful in that section in which you discuss the results of the mentioned experiments in government crowdsourcing.

- Explain more why direct democracy of the pre-internet age is more "nebulous" than online govenrment crowdsourcing. If they're really so different, why do the Cahiers de Doléances get an entire paragraph of detail in this article?

- "Many recent, Internet-centric programs of public involvement such as ship naming polls are not forms of government crowdsourcing, despite their use of an IT medium to solicit public input, as they are exclusively directed by the government agency." Why is "directed by the government agency" mutually exclusive from crowd sourcing? Explain more.

- Otherwise, I like your structure a lot, and I think it makes good sense to break up your categories as pre-internet and post-internet. I think you need to discuss the "modern" examples in far more detail, because right now, you have written more about pre-internet examples, though you also say that they are very dissimilar to actual "government crowdsourcing." Think you have a lot of good information though. Seems like it's going well.

Old draft; shifting to different article

Crowdsourcing in Public Policy is a specific type of Crowdsourcing which is applied to the creation and evaluation of public policy. This form of crowdsourcing allows governments, via an online medium, to tap a diverse field of perspectives and expertise and apply that knowledge to developing policy, becoming not only more aware of and responsive to the issues presented by their constituents, but also more receptive to unconventional solutions. (Cite Brabham 35) Such collaboration between government and governed first arose in the form of government sponsored competitions, such as the Longitude Prize

The specific details of each crowdsourcing project vary, but, generally speaking, they have all been open collaborations, rather than Virtual Labor Markets (VLMs), or Tournament Crowdsourcing, the other two types of crowdsourcing identified by Prpic, Taeihagh, and Melton. (Citation) A form of limited tournament crowdsourcing takes place when companies bid for government contracts, military or otherwise, which for obvious reasons doesn't quite qualify as crowdsourcing

While crowdsourcing in public policy is similar to previously implemented policies such as the Peer-to-Patent program, it is distinguished by a back and forth interaction between the government and the people, as both parties provide input and set the direction of the project. (Brabham)

Potential sources

http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/crowdsourcing-for-public-policy-and-government/ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.86/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.84/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.90/abstract http://wtf.tw/ref/brabham.pdf https://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/christian_bason_v17i1a4.pdf Prpic, Taeihagh, Melton: Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing Aitamurto and Landemore: Crowdsourced Deliberation; The case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland

Article Evaluation: Sortition

Comments: This is an interesting and thorough page in that it covers a lot of thought from many different authors, but at the cost of covering very little of it in depth. The discussions of historical sortition lack a good chunk of context, especially the blurb on Swiss mayoral systems. While it makes sense that information would be lacking on ancient and medieval systems of government, especially from cultures which achieved less fame after their demise than Athens, it still seems improvable. Structurally, the use of bullet points, especially of a single bullet point to summarize an entire work, seems somewhat of a disservice to the works. To be fair, the impartiality required of wikipedia does demand a distance from a work, which works most of the time. Unfortunately, I think discussing sortition inherently requires some level of analysis, as it it a newer idea that is still being fleshed out. Finally, I'm a touch surprised that there wasn't a more detailed mention of citizen's assemblies, as they're a critical example of sortition at work.

Questions: What were the events that led up to the creation of sortition systems? How did each implementation affect the ideas driving the principle and what, if any, emergent properties of sortition have been discovered?

Potential articles to write on/other ideas with no defined space

Twitch plays pokemon as a model for real-life online democracy AskHistorians vs. 4chan boards as a model for online direct work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Deliberative_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media_and_political_communication_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Crowdsourcing