Tanja Aitamurto Crowdsourcing for Democracy: A New Era in Policy-Making Publication of the Committee for the Future | 1/2012 THE COMMIttEE FOR THE FUTURE is an established, standing committee in the Parliament of Finland. The Committee consists of 17 Members of the Finnish Parliament. The Committee serves as a Think Tank for futures, science and technology policy in Finland. The counterpart cabinet member is the Prime Minister. The Committee was established in 1993. Crowdsourcing for Democracy: A New Era in Policy-Making Tanja Aitamurto Publication of the Committee for the Future | 1/2012 Tanja Aitamurto Visiting Researcher Liberation Technology Program Stanford University United States [email protected] Layout: Kirmo Kivelä ISBN 978-951-53-3459-6 (Paperback) ISBN 978-951-53-3460-2 (PDF) Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) applies to the right to use this work. More here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Foreword INNISH PEOPLE are now more edu- that use the power and knowledge of crowds cated and capable of following world brought together through the internet. F affairs than ever before. Yet over the Crowdsourcing offers exciting possibili- long run traditional forms of political par- ties for democracy. Citizens can take part in ticipation have declined considerably. Voter brainstorming, discussing, developing, and turnout remains relatively low, most parties even implementing decisions that used to be are losing members and it is more difficult to the domain of political and expert elites. get people to run for office. People’s participation through crowd- It would probably be an exaggeration to sourcing does not replace traditional demo- state democracy is in crisis. Finnish people cratic tools or experts, but complements and are still interested in politics and society. supports them. Participation can yield better However, people’s trust in the political sys- decisions. A thousand pairs of eyes will spot tem and representatives has eroded – and, as potential problems easier and a thousand many fear, it is likely to keep on eroding in heads will come up with more new ideas than the future. just a few. This benefits all. Tanja Aitamurto We need to do something. We must up- has done ground-breaking work in introduc- date democracy for this millennium using ing crowdsourcing to Finland. I hope this re- new technologies. port will inspire state and local authorities as Crowdsourcing is less a new idea than a well as companies and civic groups to experi- new concept. It covers a wide array of tools ment and implement crowdsourcing. Oras Tynkkynen Vice Chairperson, Lead in the Crowdsourcing Project Committee of the Future, Standing Committee Parliament of Finland 5 | Foreword Contents Foreword 5 1. Introduction 7 2. What is crowdsourcing? 8 – Definition of crowdsourcing 8 – Crowdsourcing in practice 9 Crowdmapping 9 Innovation processes 11 Creative work and entertainment 13 Journalism 14 Microwork 15 Crowdfunding 15 – Evolution of crowdsourcing 17 3. Crowdsourcing in democratic processes 18 – Law and strategy processes 18 Constitution reform in Iceland 18 National Dialogues in the United States 20 – Participatory budgeting 23 Budget preparation in Chicago 23 Budget preparation in Calgary 24 – Citizen petition sites 25 Open Ministry in Finland 25 We the People in the United States 27 – Open innovation and innovation challenges 29 4. The role of crowdsourcing in democratic processes 30 – Impact of crowdsourcing on democracy 30 – Amateurs or experts? 32 – Crowdsourcing in Open Government 33 5. Ingredients for successful crowdsourcing 34 6. Challenges of crowdsourcing 37 7. Policy recommendations 40 8. Conclusion 42 Bibliography 43 Crowdsourcing for Democracy: A New Era in Policy-Making | 6 1. Introduction N ARRAY of local and national gov- author’s academic orientation, this book has ernments around the world have an academic touch to it, yet it is also meant A applied crowdsourcing as a partici- to serve as a handbook for crowdsourcing in patory method to engage citizens in political policy-making. processes. Citizens are invited to share their The book is structured as follows. In ideas, perspectives and opinions about mat- Chapter 2, we’ll get an overview of crowd- ters that traditionally were beyond their ac- sourcing in several fields, thus giving context cess and influence. to the rise of participatory culture. This chap- This book is an introduction to crowd- ter addresses often posed questions about sourcing in policy-making. By introducing crowdsourcing and related phenomena like case studies from several countries, the book microwork and crowdfunding. Chapter 3 in- demonstrates how crowdsourcing has been troduces an array of cases, in which crowd- used in participatory budgeting in Canada, sourcing has been used in policy-making. federal strategies in the United States, and Chapter 4 analyses the role of crowdsourc- constitution reform in Iceland. By drawing ing in democratic processes, crowdsourcing on these cases, the book analyzes the role of as a part of Open Government practices, and crowdsourcing in democracy. Furthermore, the impact of crowdsourcing on democracy. the book summarizes the best practices for Chapter 5 outlines the factors for success- crowdsourcing and outlines the benefits and ful crowdsourcing. Chapter 6 discusses the challenges of open processes. challenges of crowdsourcing. Chapter 7 gives The book is based on a report for the Com- policy recommendations for enhancing mittee of the Future in the Parliament of Fin- transparency, accountability and citizen par- land, delivered by the author in the Spring of ticipation in the Finnish governance. Chapter 2012. The author, Tanja Aitamurto, is a visit- 8 concludes the book by encouraging actors ing researcher1 at the Liberation Technology in society to experiment with new tools for Program at Stanford University. Due to the openness, transparency and accountability. 1 http://fsi.stanford.edu/people/Tanja_Aitamurto/ Tanja Aitamurto 20th October, 2012 Stanford, California. Visiting Researcher Liberation Technology Program Stanford University [email protected] www.tanjaaitamurto.com 7 | Introduction 2. What is crowdsourcing? Definition of crowdsourcing ROWDSOURCING is an open call versity (c.f. Hong and Page, 2012), which can for anybody to participate in a task be amplified by deploying crowdsourcing. C open online (Brabham, 2008; Howe, Collective intelligence can refer to wisdom, 2008), where ‘the crowd’ refers to an unde- talent, and knowledge alike; ‘collective wis- fined group of people who participate. Out- dom’ can be used instead to emphasize the sourcing, in contrast, means that the task is temporal dimension: that wisdom extended assigned to a specific agent. In crowdsourcing through space and generations, and through applications, the crowd is invited to partici- collective memory (Landemore, 2012). Im- pate in an online task by submitting informa- proved communication technologies have tion, knowledge, or talent. Crowdsourcing enabled more sophisticated use of collective has become a popular tool to engage people in intelligence, and co-creation and crowdsourc- processes ranging from urban planning (Brab- ing have become popular methods to harness ham, 2010) to new product design and solv- collective intelligence. ing complex scientific problems (Aitamurto, Crowdsourcing can be roughly divided Leiponen & Tee, 2011.) Crowdsourced tasks into voluntary (non-pecuniary) and paid (pe- are typically open for anybody to participate cuniary) crowdsourcing.1 Voluntary crowd- in online. ‘Anybody’ is, however, always a sourcing refers to tasks that people participate constrained population: not everybody has in voluntarily, without receiving a payment. access to the Internet, and not everybody Pecuniary crowdsourcing, instead, refers to knows about the possibility to participate. paid tasks. “Microtasks” and “microwork” The term ‘crowdsourcing’ is also used in which are done through virtual market plac- contexts in which the task is open only to a es such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, for in- restricted group like employees in a certain stance, are pecuniary crowdsourcing. Innova- organization. Companies, for instance, use tion challenges, which are crowdsourcing so- crowdsourcing as a part of their design pro- lutions for design tasks or scientific problems, cess within the organization. fall between these two categories. In these Crowdsourcing serves as a tool to gather challenges, it is possible to get a monetary collective intelligence for a variety of pur- reward, but one is not guaranteed, because it poses. Collective intelligence (Levy, 1997) is a competition. (More about crowdsourcing is based on the idea that knowledge is most in innovation challenges later in Chapter 2.) accurate when it consists of inputs from a This book focuses on voluntary crowd- distributed population. Levy describes col- sourcing. Particularly, the focus is on crowd- lective intelligence as ‘‘a form of universally sourcing for democratic processes. An im- distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, portant conceptual notion here for the sake coordinated in real time, and resulting in the of clarity: in this book, we don’t focus on effective mobilization of skills’’ (Levy, 1997, Wikitype collaboration, which can be defined p. 13.) The opposite of collective intelligence as commons-based peer production (Benkler, is reliance on a single agent-for example, one knowledgeable expert. Collective