As I noted last week, I see widespread confusion around some of the key terms in the conversation about government 2.0 in general and participation in particular: public participation, crowdsourcing and “the wisdom of the crowds” — unless I am terribly mistaken, the three don’t mean the same thing and hence should not be used interchangeably.
Over on Andrea DiMaio’s blog, I just left a comment that takes a first stab at trying to clear up the confusion:
It seems to me there is quite a bit of confusion in terms of some of the terminologies that are being thrown around. In my view, crowdsourcing and public participation are not the same. In fact, there may be less overlap between the two than some people think.
Here’s where I see the main differences:
For example, crowdsourcing usually involves clearly defined goals and measurable outcomes (e.g. improving an algorithm, doing pharmaceutical research, vetting satellite imagery etc.). In cases where there aren’t any objective success criteria (e.g. some design contests), at least there is a committee that has full authority to rate and rank contributions and pick a winner. It is irrelevant who participates in a crowdsourcing initiative, and there is no concept of participants having to buy into or agree with the outcome or winning proposal.
Public participation, on the other hand, is about engaging citizens in decision making that often involves making difficult trade-offs based on conflicting values systems (very subjective). It is extremely important that all stakeholders have a seat at the table and feel they have ownership of the process. Most of the time the process will be guided by consensus seeking of some kind and achieving a certain level of agreement across all participants is required in the end in order for things to be able to move forward politically.
Can and should crowdsourcing as we know it be applied to help with certain pieces of policy making? Absolutely. But will it be sufficient to qualify as and achieve the goals of public participation? Most certainly not.
I think this is an important piece of the discussion. Let me know in the comments how you make sense of the two concepts, how the differ or complement each other. Thanks!
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If you interested in crowdsourcing in business, we are co-hosting an online event (including Jeff Howe) on Thursday Sept. 17 at 9am PST to discuss how and when crowdsourcing becomes a mainstream practice for business.
For more info:
http://www.smartsheet.com/crowdwork
Attendees also receive a white paper on the future of crowdsourcing in business.
I can send you an advanced copy of the white paper if you are interested. Let me know.
Thanks!
Todd Jones
I’ve been writing about this confusion too: http://www.deliberations.com.au/2009/09/crowd-sourcing-good-for-ideas-but-not.html
Thanks, Ron!
I see this happen all over the place and I’d really like to work out the relationship between these terms in a little more detail. Same goes for “the widsom of crowds”, by the way, another often-misused term.
Maybe digging up a few good definitions might be a good start. Have anything handy?
Tim,
You said:
“Most of the time the process [public participation] will be guided by consensus seeking of some kind and achieving a certain level of agreement across all participants is required in the end in order for things to be able to move forward politically.”
I agree with what you say, but only because you use the qualifier “Most of the time …”.
Sometimes, the public does participate in a decision-making process but is NOT involved in a consensus on the final decision.
For example, as part of the Open Government Dialogue, the public did collaborate on ideas for “open-government”, but we (the public) were not involved in consensus on the final document (i.e., the Open Government Directive). This is the typically the case in almost all government proposals.
So I would say that “public participation”, although BETTER when it does include collaboration and/or consensus, DOES still occur (albeit not as well) when those aspects are missing (e.g., a public hearing or “listening session”).
Therefore, as you describe it, “Crowdsourcing” is a type of participation that only involves collaboration.
“Public participation”, at its very least, allows the public to speak out about a specific proposal, even if only as collection of monologues (as at a public hearing).
Does that make sense?
Thanks, Stephen. I should have been more accurate. That’s the problem with quickly jotting down these short blog posts.
I think I was referring to what the original NYT article (‘Athens’ on the Net) called the “pros and cons of crowdsourcing policy-making”.
So that’s part of the confusion also. At most, the projects we’ve seen recently would only inform the decision making body. The actual policy making (the crafting) is only indirectly influenced.
I see there will be more posts on this. Maybe we can schedule a quick call this weekend as I had suggested a few weeks back.
I’ve been working on crowdsourcing as a way to solve public problems and boost public participation for some time now. If you’re interested, see two of my papers on the topic:
One from the journal Planning Theory: http://www.darenbrabham.com/files/brabhamplanning.pdf
And one from the journal Convergence:
http://www.darenbrabham.com/files/brabhamconvergence.pdf
My dissertation focuses on this topic, with an investigation of Next Stop Design (www.nextstopdesign.com), a crowdsourced bus stop design competition I headed up that was funded by a grant from the US Federal Transit Administration.
In fact, a Conservative Party official interviewed me about this topic a few months ago.
db
Thanks, Daren! I came across your paper on crowdsourcing and public participation last week. Hope to have finished reading it by this weekend and will share my comments.
Tim – I think its an interesting topic and one I’ve grappled with as well, and I’m familiar with Darren’s good work too. I think the key to using crowdsourcing as a “technique” within meaningful public engagement comes down to scoping the issue effectively. If people are just being asked to pick their favourite transit station design, it is consultation, but not deliberative or co-creative.
However, if people are asked to offer their thoughts on what they think are important considerations for transit station design, and those offerings are themed, and people are asked to take pictures that best represent those themes and why and how they think they are reflective of what that theme represents to them and maybe even asked for the pros and cons of their proposal, then people are even asked to rate their top theme with pictures…..then you’ve used the principles of crowdsourcing (and photo voice and deliberative framing) to engage people in a more deliberative and co-creative process. What do you think?
Steph
@Steph
Thanks for the comment!
I agree there are a number of ways crowdsourcing might be applied during the public participation process.
I’m starting to think, though, that one of the following has to be true for it to be a valid approach: either the evaluation criteria for participant input are fairly objective, or it isn’t necessary to integrate the input across all stakeholders.
I can see how this probably warrants another blog post…
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