Citizensourcing
Straightforward paper by Hilgers & Ihl freely published by IAP2 in its International Journal of Public Participation. The authors argue that public participation should be seen in three categories:
- Citizen ideation and innovation. This is the typical “crowd-sourcing” initiative, with the aid of online technology. The challenge is to gain input from the most complete range of perspectives that are held in a community.
- Collaborative administration. This involves participatory processes of interpreting policies and laws to the benefit of an inclusive public good. It requires that public servants work openly with the public in carrying out their regulatory and administrative duties.
- Collaborative democracy. This involves deliberative processes to prioritise and recommend policies and laws for executive and public take-up.
The authors could have written more about the work done by this categorisation. Certainly, all three are required for a deliberative democracy. These categories would feed each other, the output of one becoming the input to the others.
Each category makes different demands of online technology. Whereas (1) merely requires software to promote independent and unconstrained brainstorming, deliberative processes (3) require more mutually-engaging online environments that encourage constructive and convivial exchange towards identified goals. Technologically, we see a lot of (1), but the best of (3) have yet to be rolled out.
Government 2.0 initiatives encourage open data provision and collaborative software developments between public and private interests, which are well underway to support (2).
Too often we only see one category of public participation. For example there are many deliberative processes (3) where the options were not captured (1) or themed (2) very transparently. Also, we increasingly see public ideation exercises (1) that do not lead anywhere.
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