Crowdsourcing for Public Policy and Government

If elections were invented today, they would probably be referred to as "crowdsourcing the government." First coined in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine 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 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 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.