Crowdsourcing for Public Policy and Government
Vili Lehdonvirta, Jonathan Bright · Policy & Internet · 2015
If elections were invented today, they would probably be referred to as "crowdsourcing the government."First coined in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine (Howe, 2006), the term crowdsourcing has come to be applied loosely to a wide variety of situations where ideas, opinions, labor, or something else is "sourced" in from a potentially large group of people.While most commonly applied in business contexts, there is an increasing amount of buzz around applying crowdsourcing techniques in government and policy contexts as well (Brabham, 2013).Though there is nothing qualitatively new about involving more people in government and policy processes, digital technologies in principle make it possible to increase the quantity of such involvement dramatically, by lowering the costs of participation (Margetts, John, Hale, & Yasseri, 2015) and making it possible to tap into people's free time (Shirky, 2010).This difference in quantity is arguably great enough to obtain a quality of its own.We can thus be justified in using the term "crowdsourcing for public policy and government" to refer to new digitally enabled ways of involving people in any aspect of democratic politics and government, not replacing but rather augmenting more traditional participation routes such as elections and referendums.In this editorial, we will briefly highlight some of the key emerging issues in research on crowdsourcing for public policy and government.Our entry point into the discussion is a collection of research papers first presented at the Internet, Politics, and Policy 2014 (IPP2014) conference organized by the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) and the Policy & Internet journal. 1 The theme of this very successful conference-our third since the founding of the journal-was "crowdsourcing for politics and policy."Out of almost 80 papers presented at the conference in September last year, 14 of the best have now been published as peer-reviewed articles in this journal, including five in this issue.A further handful of papers from the conference focusing on labor issues will be published in the next issue, but we can already now take stock of all the articles focusing on government, politics, and policy.