“Crowdsourcing” as a tool for e-participation: two experiences regarding CO2 emissions at municipal level

Abstract

Public administrations need to find innovative approaches to solving changing problems and to fulfilling their duties. Crowdsourcing in local governments could be defined as the use of new technologies in order to take advantage of citizen knowledge to find solutions to municipal problems. This paper analyzes two experiences of crowdsourcing at local level, and the opinions of the citizens and managers involved, to provide an initial assessment of its effectiveness and suggest avenues for improvement. Engaging citizens in e-participation initiatives is a challenge but, for public sector crowdsourcing initiatives, intrinsic motivation and intangible rewards seem to be enough to motivate participants. Results show that managers find citizens' propositions viable, but publishing the final results and indicating how the ideas selected will be further developed are pending tasks. Caution is needed as failure to deliver the benefits deemed essential by citizens can make them even more reluctant to engage.

Using Crowdsourcing to Support Civic Engagement in Strategic Urban Development Planning: A Case Study of Ostrava, Czech Republic

“…According to Zuccon et al (2013), crowdsourcing provides urban governments with an opportunity of reaching higher a number of participants (it enables to harness collective intelligence among population in ways face-to-face meetings cannot (Brabham, 2009)) and exploit citizens' knowledge (citizens have rich knowledge of their concerns) to develop innovative solutions to increasingly serious and complex societal problems. This is confirmed by Royo & Yetano (2015), who state that crowdsourcing enables municipalities to take advantage of citizens' knowledge to find solutions to pre-defined problems.…”

“…Besides helping to solve local problems, the fact of engaging a crowd of people to address complex issues save the administration money (Schweitzer, Buchinger, Gassmann, & Obrist, 2013;Royo & Yetano, 2015) and lead to more legitimate choices as it results in the design of better, more socially rooted, balanced and realistic policies (Spiliotopoulou, Charalabidis, N. Loukis, & Diamantopoulou, 2014). This is confirmed by Zuccon et al (2013), who, proved that crowdsourcing enables to reach a higher number of participants and provides results as valuable as those furnished by traditional methods, at half the cost and collecting five times more data.…”

Exploring Relationships between Environmental Performance, E-Government and Corruption: A Multivariate Perspective

“…Alió and Gallego [71], on the one hand, and Royo and Yetano [72], on the other, point out that in matters of sustainability, citizen participation plays a critical role. As Royo, Yetano and Acerete [68] identified, the global effort for environmental protection goes hand-in-hand with citizens well-informed of environmental policies and initiatives.…”

20 anos de política, Estado e democracia digitais: uma "cartografia" do campo

“…seja na forma clássica da chamada e-participação (e-participation) que no novo tema do crowdsourcing digital em políticas públicas (cLARK et al, 2016;LEHDONvIRTA;BRIGHT, 2015;PRPIĆ;TAEIHAGH;MELTON, 2015;ROYO;YETANO, 2015) e legislações (cHRIsTENsEN; KARJALAINEN;NURMINEN, 2015), por exemplo, a ideia de boa governança ou de governos eficientes pode for-necer horizonte normativo suficiente para justificar a necessidade de participação pública como colaboração para governos e parlamentos digitais, sem que se precise recorrer à ideia de participação como aumento do poder civil (empowerment), compartilhamento de poder, reafirmação da soberania popular ou como forma de democracia direta, que são as abordagens típicas da participação pela democracia digital. Esta abordagem da e-participação menos sobrecarregada pelas demandas da teoria democrática, por exemplo, é muito comum na contribuição massiva e crescente da área de computação para o subcampo do governo eletrôni-co. Mas também em estudos da área de Administração.…”