Crowd-sourcing is not empowering enough —
I posted this in a reply to the NCDD Discussion List:
I fear that ultimately crowd-sourcing is damaging the enterprise of dialogue and deliberation (D&D).
Crowd-sourcing for options has its place, especially for idea generation or finding a needle in a public haystack. But hardly in aid of government decision making, in my opinion. Many consultants and public servants interested in Gov2.0 recognise neither the benefits of intensive deliberative engagement (they may not even be aware of such endeavours), nor the cost of the lack of inclusion or representation that can distort crowd-sourcing.
I'm most familiar with the recently completed Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce that worked by crowd-sourcing. The participants were the "usual suspects" of ICT consultants and departmental officers. I wonder how many recognised their elite status as Gov2.0 evangelists? With a few generous exceptions, for which I am grateful, my posts about deliberative approaches were met with either derision or dismissal. I didn't think like them.
I was a computing scientist before moving into D&D. Only now do I fully appreciate the fundamental differences in beliefs that would have some people advocating completely opposite policy outcomes or institutional structuring. I wonder how many Gov2.0 platform developers recognise the political triviality of crowd-sourcing, as it gets nowhere close to addressing those differences any better than does an op-ed comment stream?
My fear is that "crowd-sourcing" is compelling Orwellian double-speak: rather than the razzmatazz public empowerment that it is sold as, it reinforces the power of the convening authority while the public gains little in return. The enduring effect is that the public expectation of what "public engagement" means is steadily dumbed down. So tomorrow's "public engagement" will have nothing to do with empowerment at all. It'll just be yesterday's "hearing".
And opportunities for public deliberation remain illusive.
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Hi, interesting post.
In my view crowd sourcing approaches would be flawed if they were used to try to achieve democratic outcomes. This is also the case with face to face public meetings. You can only work with the people who turn up and that is never a representative sample.
Crowdsourcing works really well validating and harvesting ideas, gaining local context, checking for stuff you've missed, encouraging innovation in the community and (importantly) taking the time to listen to people from whom you might otherwise not hear. In my 15 years of public service I always found this sort of thing valuable.
However, with the progression of technology the seed of e-democracy has been planted. This is something entirely different and I am not entirely sure it is desirable at all.
E democracy advocates want to go beyond working with those in the room and move to giving control over decision making to those in the room. I would never advocate a crowd sourcing approach to do this. In fact I would not advocate this at all because of the groups who are necessarily excluded from such an approach.
Crowd sourcing has little downside so long as the inputs are managed in an appropriate way and those managing the process communicate the role of the engagement to manage the expectations of participants.
Posted by Matt Crozier 16 January 2010 02:01 pm | link
Thanks, Matt! That helps clarify the benefits and limitations of crowd-sourcing.
Posted by rlubensky 17 January 2010 11:15 am | link
Thanks, Ron. Not to be self-serving, but I wrote a piece on this for techPresident last year (http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/government-needs-smart-sourcing-not-crowdsourcing).
I agree with many of your points, but would also add that I think scale and scope are essential elements to use when evaluating the legitimacy of a "crowd-sourcing" effort. Specifically, the larger the audience (from cities to states to national level) I find there to be an inverse correlation between size of audience and usefulness of the data.
I also agree that an important differentiation needs to be made between idea aggregation and deliberation.
Posted by Pete Peterson 06 February 2010 05:38 am | link
Hi Pete,
Thanks for your comment, and a pointer to your very good post! I don't think there is a necessary correlation between audience size and ineffectiveness, although I agree that's generally the case today. We just need better methods and facilitation, whether face-to-face or online, to cater for larger, polarised forums. Aggregation or prioritisation is easy, that's what we do well now. I think the next challenge is for larger audiences to generate and recommend new cross-cutting policy "packages" through deliberated synthesis of aggregated ideas. And to do it at least partially online. This would scale up the preliminary policy design work that facilitated Citizens' Juries can already do quite well.
Posted by rlubensky 06 February 2010 09:19 am | link