Chapter Five - What Policy Networks Should Know
Use of crowdsourcing to engage ordinary men and experts appears to be a straightforward way to promote democratic engagement and to bring new ideas to public policy. However, there are certainly unique challenges that may hinder the progress of the crowdsourcing project for policy development. An open, non-hierarchical platform for ideas becomes a storehouse of immense energy while inspiring a significant commitment to involvement when thousands of brains work together to achieve a common goal. Some stakeholders may gracefully accept this new culture of deliberation while there may be a lot many who would express silence. For instance, it is a common practice for governments across the world to put emphasis on hierarchy, hold arguments in ‘confidential’ setups and to uphold a culture that showcases a level of scepticism for new ideas. Problem solvers, across the world, should make an effort to reunite diverse organisational cultures to allow crowdsourcing to bloom to its full potential and to add momentum and legitimacy to the process of policymaking.
Some stakeholders may gracefully accept this new culture of deliberation while there may be a lot many who would express silence.
Policymakers and participants need to know that crowdsourcing is not only about collecting opinions, but also about managing vision and aptitude. Crowdsourcing is not only meant to make governments and organisations understand the fact that citizens’ ideas should be valued and brought into reality, but it is directed to capture the wisdom and insight that a joint online brainstorming session can generate.
The process of engaging citizens is gradually becoming cheaper and cost-effective with social networks used as powerful platforms for engaging citizens. In fact, there are a lot of options successfully deployed for optimal results. For example, online forums can be designed to facilitate discussion and debate amongst millions of people located in different parts of the globe. Wikis allow for collaborative editing of policy documents whereas social networking technologies can help establish a connection between organisations and citizens.
Crowdsourced policymaking is a collaborative process which means that public officials do not have the sole responsibility to ensure successful process implementation. The residents hold an equal responsibility to collect, sort, and analyse the opinions, thus allowing public officials to drive the project. The process leads to the creation of space that provides an opportunity not only for deliberation and reflection but also for negotiation among the stakeholders. The spirit of crowdsourcing upholds the ideology that citizens’ inputs are valued and are taken seriously, though they may not be necessarily needed to be incorporated. Participants are qualified enough to be able to provide valuable data to the industry-specific requirement of the governmental agency. In fact, there may be cases in which a public body may choose to review the quality of the public inputs by keeping a system in place once the initial recommendations and reviews by groups that comprise of individuals who wanted to offer their expertise initially. This works to reduce some amount of burden which would otherwise levy on governmental officials for working on projects out of organisational boundaries.
The spirit of crowdsourcing upholds the ideology that citizens’ inputs are valued and are taken seriously, though they may not be necessarily needed to be incorporated.
As I mentioned earlier, legitimacy relies on inclusiveness. And it goes without saying that policy networks have a significant challenge to overcome when it comes to ensuring inclusiveness irrespective of the presence of socio-cultural-religious-economic barriers. This scenario can be described taking the case of the Habitat Jam project into consideration. This project was meant to be the voice of poor classes such as slum dwellers and villagers and faced a tremendous challenge in progress because the target group had very little or no access to the Internet. People who had access to the Internet used their old mobile phones which could support some very basic applications. This problem was addressed by the involvement of more than 400 civil society organisations that were made responsible for connecting with the target audience. These groups established internet kiosks in slums and villages where people could now get their recommendations incorporated into the Habitat Jam website. Public meetings were organised to discuss the developments, and cyber cafes became platforms for active public participation. In Kenya, one deaf man even brought his translator to make sure that his ideas communicated to the international leaders.
Achieving a situation of authentic citizen participation is difficult as it requires international organisations and policy networks to bring a significant shift in their culture and process of decision-making. And this would typically demand efforts to strengthen the democratic processes. Participatory Policymaking is meant to create a circle of policy innovation on a full spectrum of knowledge shared by participants in government, business, and the civil society. In the future, decision-making influenced by the mutual interaction between participants in internetworked groups, governments will have to loosen their control over the policymaking process. To promote participatory policymaking processes that encourage public input at every stage of policy development, from problem classification to analysis, to identifying workable initiatives and making decisions.
Successful implementation of the crowdsourcing process at a global level relies on the extent to which the process allows for accountability. A crowdsourcing project should typically have the potential to promote changes that would determine the face of the future society. These projects have the power to create a future when interactive democracy defines the authority of global organisations and the legitimacy of global decision-making. It is also important to ensure that a crowdsourcing project does not become a mere vehicle for organised interest groups to amplify their voices. Crowdsourcing is meant to hear from segments that cannot be reached commonly and not for those who are heard at the time of policymaking.
Policy networks may be plagued by some challenges that may block participation. These may show up as the inability to address social and political divides and to provide a reliable platform where people with different political philosophies can participate in policy deliberation. Moreover, it is often a challenge to identify the tasks for which crowdsourcing is an ideal solution. Establishment of a technical interface that would support maximum participation and the responsibility to maintain a certain level of involvement by keeping appropriate incentives in place are large tasks that ensure the success of a crowdsourcing process. It is also important to ensure the privacy and safety of contributors and to deploy appropriate filtering, rating, cross-checking, and expert moderation measures to ensure the quality of outcomes. These challenges take up a bigger form in fragile state environments compared to stable government setups.
There may be instances in which top-down platforms may be centrally controlled and may fail to assure reputational gains or incentives to the contributors. Most importantly, most individuals do not believe that their inputs would be used responsibly and this holds true particularly for authoritarian regimes. Under such situations, even NGOs or social entrepreneurs may face enormous obstacles in launching crowdsourcing initiative. E-governance has been witnessing very slow progress even in industrialised nations owing to the attitude that democracies have been demonstrating on data sharing. Governments do hesitate to share official data, and this is a hard truth. It goes without saying; the less legitimate a process is, the more it tends to be on the secretive path.
Capacity building and investment on mediators and transcription tools may take a toll on the crowdsourcing project budget, but cannot be avoided in any way as the goal of every crowdsourcing process is to reach vulnerable populations whose opinions matter the most in policymaking. Typically, governments with weak demographic processes rely on inputs from the limited elite mass of the society and do not take any initiative to reduce inequalities that obstruct mass participation.
There is a problem if a system is too simple or if it is too complicated. Systems that are more sophisticated and equipped with advanced deliberation tools may empower a group of moderators who have no public legitimacy. On the opposite side, a simpler platform may create a possibility for a minority opposition to be washed out quickly. This may take a serious shape in situations of weak governance and when a crowdsourcing project aims to combine official inputs with public contributions that are based on the same information management standards. A lot of critics have argued that an informal ad-hoc data collection procedure does not assure consistency in coverage or detail. On the other hand, crowdsourced data can be more up-to-the-minute compared to formal survey data that is collected some time back. With this, it is apparent that although the quality, content, and attributes of crowdsourced data and precise data may conflict with each other, they can still be combined with each other in perfect harmony to generate a complete, comprehensive, and clearer picture of the project outcome.
A lot of critics have argued that an informal ad-hoc data collection procedure does not assure consistency in coverage or detail.
There may be situations in which the contributors may face risks of being attacked. In a troubled authoritarian governance situation, which is known for its human right violation and conflict cases, GPS-based data tracking can be used by national security personnel to track down contributors and convict them. Managing contributions systematically may pose as a mammoth task for the organisers if they fail to keep sophisticated data management structures in place for managing chaotic data.
In a nutshell, the risks and challenges associated with crowdsourcing originate out of the distrust that people demonstrate towards weak governance or authority that has failed to portray acceptable levels of legitimacy.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 5: What Policy Networks Should Know in MindHive: How Collective Intelligence can Create Better Policy and Strategy. Hivers are welcome to read, rip, share and contribute their learnings on crowdsourcing to the next chapter of #collectiveintelligence
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Bruce Muirhead is the CEO of Eidos Institute and the Founder of MindHive.org — More Blogs here: https://mindhive.org/slp/blog.html