Crowdsourcing
is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent
(usually an employee) and outsourcing to an undefined, generally large group of
people in the form of an open call. In other words, a company posts a problem
it is facing on the internet, individuals submit solutions, winning ideas are
rewarded, and the company mass produces the innovation for profit.
Crowdsourcing differs from open source in terms of both intellectual property
rights and participants’ motivation. Innovation becomes company’s property after
it offered by crowd and mostly peer recognition, to build a network or
financial reward is the main motivation of participants of crowdsourcing
process. Although there are some obstacles such as citizen privacy sensitiveness
when dealing with government, different and complex nature of government
problems or relatively high personnel resistance in public sector, crowdsourcing
would be effective tool for them.[1]
With these new platforms government can issue an open call to people (all
citizens, potential contractors, industry representatives etc.) to reap the
benefits from so many people’s ideas to solve a complex government task. The
focus is on innovation, creativity, and the generation of new ideas.[2]
Considering limited resources of most agencies, this is also a very cost
effective method. There is no need for a trying different things and errors
then trying again cycle. Paying or satisfying a successful solution is that
easy. It is possible to place greater emphasis on efficient and
effective use of public funds for innovation.
My
government is aiming to draft a new constitution ambitiously even if it a
challenging task because of the highly polarized political environment. As one of the interesting
and attractive takeaway of this course, crowdsourcing and open innovation
concept promises a peaceful solution for us. With
crowdsourcing citizens of kind of political ideas or religions can find an
outlet to express their ideas and enjoy the feeling of being heard. Despite the
fact that a constitution is a technical document which requires various disciplines
such as law, sociology or politics, collective wisdom of whole nation might
open new doors to ones who prepares it. And we have example of Iceland at hand
that has the first crowdsourced constitution in the world. Except such high
level issues crowdsourcing is the most relevant for municipalities in my
country. Desire to reelection and a close relation with voters compels mayors
to be more responsive. As well as providing solutions to lots of local problems
by an open contest, this method can be applied to evaluation of alternatives of
a certain project. Apparently direct engagement of citizens to municipality’s problems
which will be their own problems at the end of the day is the most powerful
aspect of it. Apart of participation ratios to this kind of contests, promoting
awareness among citizens is another important gain of the method.
I really feel eager to use
this method in my own department and maybe prepare a detailed proposal for
relevant governmental bodies. But taking into account their negative feelings
for social media and their efforts to ban them, I’m not sure that my government
would be willing to adopt this kind of modern ways. But as we know a bottom-up
approach would give its fruits sooner or later. That’s why promoting this new
ideas and tool among my fellow colleagues seem to be the most appropriate way
for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment