From an otherwise interesting post on Govfresh last week about the use of contests in citizen engagement: Collaborative innovation in open government: Is there an app for that?
Could contests help us realize the vision of participatory democracy outlined by Thomas Jefferson, where citizens collaborate with government to solve the nation’s most difficult problems? The White House hopes so. As the Federal Times reported this morning, agencies are trying to crowdsource their way out of problems.
These efforts won’t always work out as proponents might hope. To date, crowdsourcing government reform has had mixed results. The new British government’s first crowdsourcing attempt fails to alter Whitehall line. And as Wired’s Jeff Home observed last year, crowdsourcing and the President were a “failed marriage” when the new administration tried its first online town hall.
Not to be too picky, but here’s the comment I left (as of now still awaiting moderation):
I have one simple request:
Could we please stop referring to every online comment form under the sun as “crowdsourcing”? Please!
The “Programme for Government” website, which the new UK government launched shortly after it came into power in May of this year, had nothing whatsoever to do with crowdsourcing. Blindly repeating The Guardian’s misleading headline doesn’t make it so.
Here’s what actually happened:
After the usual negotiations, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats had come to a definite agreement on which to base their coalition government. In the spirit of transparency, they presented the final document on a public website. Yes, they offered citizens the opportunity to comment. But no, it was never their intention to engage in a two-way conversation, let alone incorporate any of the feedback and make changes to their program based on citizens’ input.
No crowdsourcing there!
Granted, they did do a rather poor job communicating the scope of this exercise, which led many participants to believe the document was still open to modifications (hence the disappointment), but that’s another issue entirely.
So there.
Here’s what Simon Dickson, who built the Programme for Government website, had to say recently: Commenting is not crowdsourcing
Now, I’m speaking for nobody but myself here – but what the Guardian piece doesn’t fairly reflect is that it was not a crowdsourcing exercise, nor even a consultation.
It was the definitive statement of the outcome of negotiations between the two parties currently forming the country’s coalition government. It was not ‘give us some ideas for what you think we might have agreed.’ The comment box provided an opportunity for people to voice opinions or ask questions, and government promised it would listen.
There was no commitment to take the responses back for a second round of coalition negotiations. To do so would have been quite ridiculous. So I’d argue that it’s entirely reasonable for the departmental responses to take the position of ‘well, we’ve heard what you say, but…’.
I previously wrote about Programme for Government here and here.
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