Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
In what is turning out to be a truly fun excercise, This Week in Participation (our new little internet radio show) has meanwhile cranked out a couple more episodes:
Both sessions came in at under 20 minutes each and together make for a nice follow-up to a lot of posts on this blog. If you’ve been reading here over the past year, you should enjoy the insights shared by both our guests.
Last week, Federal Computer Week published an op-ed they had invited me to write on the issue of crowdsourcing, public participation and how the former might be applied in the context of the latter: The outer limits to the crowd’s wisdom
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that this is something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around over the past few months, especially since the conversation on the web continues to be characterized by confusion about concepts and terminology. The article is a good interim summary of my efforts, and more aspects remain to be explored.
I would like to thank the many who have contributed to this discussion in the comments, via the NCDD mailing list, on GovLoop and elsewhere on the web. Sharing your thoughts so generously has certainly helped me clarify mine. Please keep it up!
This post is not a deep dive into the definition of crowdsourcing but rather a quick mental note for myself.
Jeff Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing back in 2006, offers this “white paper version” of a definition in the sidebar of his blog:
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
His “soundbyte version” appears to be slightly broader in scope:
The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
Howe’s original article appeared in the June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine: The Rise of Crowdsourcing
Here’s the list of examples that are mentioned in the article:
Along with Wikipedia and Open Source in general, these are some of the most-commonly referenced examples in the discussions around crowdsourcing and public participation. However, as per my previous outline, I am not convinced they really apply.
At least at the involve/collaborate/empower level of IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation (PDF), public participation at the core is an integration process. The question remains if and to what degree this process can be crowdsourced.
Richard Fahey has a detailed post up about an interesting crowdsourcing idea that has been proposed by the Conservative Party in the UK: £1m prize for citizen participation platform
Earlier this week the UK Conservative party promised to offer a £1m cash prize to a person or team that creates an online platform that can be used to solve “common problems”.
The prize – which the party says will be the largest offered by a British government in modern times – will be awarded for a platform in which citizens can post ideas in relation to government policy. The exact specifics of the platform have not been outlined, but it’s envisioned as a mesh between Fixmystreet, Facebook, Spigit, IdeaScale and MixedInk.
The platform will need to be able to sift through millions of online comments and highlight the most sensible suggestions from those with experience of the area in question. Most current idea generation platforms use digg-like voting mechanisms as a means of highlighting the most popular suggestions. The £1million prize is on offer to anyone who can devise a more sophisticated way of sifting through suggestions and weighting relevant ideas in an appropriate manner.
According to the press release (quoted on the IdealGovernment from an email), the end goal here is to create a citizen participation platform that enables the soon-to-be-elected new UK government to — among other things — “tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges”.
The press release mentions a number of examples where some kind of online collaboration among citizens could be quite useful (e.g. identifying wasteful government spending, co-creating government how-to information or mapping out traffic routes around road construction sites). But it also goes into the area of public participation.
My comment on Richard’s blog makes for a nice follow-up to my previous attempt at comparing crowdsourcing and public participation, which is why I re-post it here:
Great post, thanks for the detailed write-up!
In the original email from MP Hunt (as quoted in the IdealGovernment post), he describes what they have in mind as “an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges. In government, we will use this platform to publish all Green Papers, and open up the entire policy making process to the public.” The press release goes on to state that using this platform the public would be able to “collaborate to improve government policy.”
Policy making ultimately means having to deal with difficult trade-offs and making tough choices. Contrary to the previous commenters, I’d argue that it remains a huge challenge to meaningfully engage citizens in this process, particularly online.
While the crowdsourcing initiatives that are often mentioned in this context (e.g. FixMyStreet, the Netflix Prize, the Next Stop Design contest etc.) may vary in terms of problem complexity and a few other aspects, they seem to share — to some degree, at least — a number of key characteristics:
- Nice-to have (non-critical projects, ok to cancel at any time)
- Not very time-bound
- Objective evaluation criteria or success metrics
- No concept of “stakeholders”
- No need for representativeness or inclusion (the requirement to have all stakeholders at the table)
- No need for consensus seeking/building among stakeholders/participants
- No need for deliberation
Unfortunately, public participation (engaging citizens in decision making) is almost never lucky enough to rely on conditions as easy as these.
There are a number of online tools out there that seem to support the process needs of public participation fairly well. However, they still tend to require a high degree of human moderation and facilitation (in essence, exception handling), which makes them really hard to scale. That, in my view, is the real challenge that a “citizen participation platform” contest might help address.
Just to state the obvious, here’s how an average policy issue at the local level, such as a broken city budget or a contested urban planning project, might differ from the conditions outlined above — further indication that crowdsourcing as we know it may not easily apply to public participation (or at least not in the straightforward ways that many seem to suggest all too eagerly):
This is just a quick list of differentiators I came up with on the fly; there may be more, of course.
At this point in time, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of work remains to be done before we see technology that can handle these requirements. Running a contest that might help improve our understanding of the challenges and how they might be solved (while producing some open source software along the way) maybe isn’t a bad idea at all. Definitely worth watching!
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!
David Wilcox reports on a talk Clay Shirky gave at the London School of Economics this past week about collective action in a political context and some of the discussions that have since ensued: Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise
Clay Shirky, leading commentator on internet technologies and author of Here Comes Everybody, last night backed away from his earlier enthusiasm for the online wisdom of crowds in democratic decision-making. He suggested that Government use of social media should focus more on “small groups of smart people arguing with each other”, than national-scale engagement online.
We’ll, that’s my interpretation. You can listen for yourself … and find more on Twitter from last night and today’s at ICA.
A few years back Clay said that the ability of groups to organise online and challenge conventional engagement was “the glory of this medium”. He now believes we need more checks and balances.
Shirky’s examples include the spread of information following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China and the viral success of the will.i.am song “Yes We Can”). Starting at around 30:30 into the video, Shirky takes a look at Change.gov as an example of “wisdom of crowds instantiated in a political context”. He sees the fact that the call for legalization of medical marijuana ended up being the top-rated item in the Citizen’s Briefing Book as a sign that
… this is another place where certain kinds of special interests can make their feelings known. But it is not the same as saying anything that’s thrown to the top of Change.gov therefore has or should have priority in the president’s queue.
And so the problem we’ve got now isn’t a problem of capability, it’s a problem of legitimacy. Under what circumstances would you take advice from people primarily coordinated on the internet and headed for political action and under what circumstances would you ignore that advice. [...]
But unless there’s a principle by which you can say that all you’re really doing is saying it’s nice that you have this outlet (?) but we’re not going to take it seriously. But then if you go the other extreme and say you have write privileges to the president’s calendar, you can’t do that either. And the only way when we’re in situations where neither extreme solution works is to set up a set of checks and balances and that’s where I think the conversation is going.
A few thoughts as per my earlier comments here and here:
Not every crowd is wise. That realization shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, especially when you consider that the groups that formed during the various e-participation efforts on Change.gov don’t even fit Surowiecki’s list of conditions:
By that standard, the groups that formed during the various e-participation efforts on Change.gov clearly weren’t wise. For example, in violation of the second rule above, not only were participants’ choices (aggregate number of votes for, say, an idea) exposed while voting was still in process but ideas were listed in order of popularity. This led to herding, favoring those relatively few ideas that managed to gain an early lead.
Moreover, it is debatable whether the concept of crowd wisdom applies to value judgments in just the same way it seems to apply to factual issues (I don’t remember any examples in Surowiecki’s book that would support the former). Since policy discussions are often comprised of both (they certainly were on Change.gov), I wonder to what extent the theories of crowd wisdom really apply here.
It’s also debatable whether what we saw on Change.gov really amounts to decision making. I’d argue it was some low-level form of general input gathering with ranked preferences for questions and ideas: fairly broad, with little structure and little to no process (and still flawed in many ways). On the actual issues no choices were made.
As far as I know, there was never any commitment on part of the transition team to let the Digg-style voting algorithms employed on Change.gov determine what Obama’s priorities would or should be. Instead, the Citizen’s Briefing Book was intended solely as a compilation of “facts and recommendations to be considered while crafting and enacting policies.” Nothing binding in there, just another channel for public input.
Applying IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation, the last two points illustrate that the e-participation efforts on Change.gov can be categorized as inform/consult types, not the more advanced involve/collaborate/empower types, in which case they may have had all the legitimacy they needed.
I generally agree with Shirky that there are many issues facing efforts such as Change.gov with regard to legitimacy and process, just that a more differentiated analysis is needed to figure out where exactly the challenges lie and what conclusions we should draw. For government to abandon work on large-scale efforts and instead focus on small-group engagement alone seems premature advice at this point.
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