global w8

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Dr. John Bosire, PhD, LSS MBB

Chapter Goals and Objectives

Overall – students will learn and understand:

▪ consequences of complexity in the real-world, and

meaningful ways to understand and manage such situations

▪ the implications of complexity and that many social systems

are unpredictable by nature, especially when in the

presence of structural change (transitions)

▪ natural tendency to criticize the approaches that ignore

difficulties and pretend to predict using simplistic models

▪ that managing a complex system requires a good

understanding of the dynamics of the system in question—to

know, before they occur, some of the real possibilities that

might occur and be ready so they can be reacted to as

responsively as possible.

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Dr. John Bosire, PhD, LSS MBB

▪ What is Crowdsourcing?

▪ defined as the act of a company or institution taking a function once

performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined large network of

people in the form of an open call (Howe, 2006)

▪ What is the definition of “Collective Intelligence?”

▪ It’s the web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a

distributed network of individuals to exploit ‘collective wisdom’ and mine fresh

ideas from large numbers of individuals (Brabham, 2008)

▪ Public Sector Applications:

▪ The functions of the Open Government Directive in the USA (Executive Office of

the President, 2009)

▪ It defines transparency, participation and collaboration as the main pillars of an

open government:

a. Transparency promotes accountability by providing the public with

information about what the government is doing

b. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise

so their government can benefit from information and knowledge that is

widely dispersed in society, to design better policies

12. Active and Passive Crowdsourcing in

Government

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Dr. John Bosire, PhD, LSS MBB

12. Active and Passive Crowdsourcing in

Government Cont… a. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise

so that their government can benefit from information and knowledge that is

widely dispersed in society, in order to design better policies.

b. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of government by encouraging

partnerships and cooperation within the federal government, across levels of

government, and between the government and private institutions

▪ initially developed in the private sector, and later introduced in the public sector

▪ Impact of limited knowledge and ideas of its efficiency and effectiveness in the

government

▪ introduction of two types of crowdsourcing –

▪ active and passive crowdsourcing; both came from management sciences

(crowdsourcing research)

▪ political sciences (wicked social problems research) and technological

sciences (social media capabilities and API)

▪ common characteristics of the two government crowdsourcing approaches –

▪ do not include competitive contest among the participants and monetary or

other types of rewards, as in private sector crowdsourcing, but mainly

collaboration among citizens for knowledge and innovative ideas creation

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Dr. John Bosire, PhD, LSS MBB

12. Active and Passive Crowdsourcing in

Government Cont…

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Dr. John Bosire, PhD, LSS MBB

▪ Notable reliance on community-oriented motivations and

not participants nor individualistic ones;

▪ provide adopting government agencies with non-cost

savings associated with contracts and outcome-based

payments, and not access capabilities not held in-house

▪ citizen sourcing may become a new source of policy advice,

enabling policy makers to bring together divergent ideas

that would not come from traditional sources of policy

advice

▪ likely to change the government’s perspective on the public

from an understanding of citizens as ‘users and choosers’

of government programs and services to ‘makers and

shapers’ of policies and decisions (Lukensmeyer and

Torres, 2008).

References:

Janssen, M., et al. (eds.), Policy Practice and Digital Science, Public Administration

and Information Technology 10, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-12784-2_1

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Dr. John Bosire, PhD, LSS MBB