Crowdsourcing Government: Lessons from Multiple Disciplines

• Author: Helen K. Liu
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12808
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

656

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 656–667.

© 2017 The Authors. Public Administration

Review published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

on behalf of The American Society for

Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12808.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

and is not used for commercial purposes.

Crowdsourcing Government:

Lessons from Multiple Disciplines

Helen K. Liu is assistant professor in

the Department of Politics and Public

Administration at the University of Hong

Kong. She received her PhD in public

administration from Indiana University,

Bloomington. Her research focuses on

crowdsourcing adaptation, collaborative

governance, and nonprofit management.

E-mail: helenliu4@gmail.com

Abstract : Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector

face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This review synthesizes prior crowdsourcing

research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of

crowdsourcing in the public sector. It identifies three distinct categories of crowdsourcing: organizations, products and

services, and holistic systems. Lessons about the fundamental logic of process design—alignment, motivation, and

evaluation—identified across the three categories are discussed. Conclusions drawn from past studies and the resulting

evidence can help public managers better design and implement crowdsourcing in the public sector.

Practitioner Points

• Crowdsourcing studies in the public sector show that properly designed crowdsourcing platforms can

empower citizens, create legitimacy for the government with the people, and enhance the effectiveness of

public services and goods.

• Research suggests that crowdsourcing decisions should be based on both solutions necessary to resolve public

problems and appropriate tasks for participants who have knowledge or skills.

• Evidence shows that prizes and rewards can increase participation rates, but opportunities for learning and

skill building are essential for enhancing the quality of participants’ contributions.

• Studies indicate that a crowdsourcing approach empowers participants through peer review by adopting

constructive competition and supportive cooperation designs in the review process.

• Studies illustrate that the establishment of an effective reputation system in the crowdsourcing process can

ensure legitimate evaluation.

Hal G. Rainey, Editor

Helen K. Liu

University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

H owe ( 2006 ) first identified crowdsourcing as

the act of an organization taking a function

once performed by an organization ’ s own

employees and outsourcing it to people outside the

organization (crowd) through an open call online.

Government administrators and public managers

have begun to recognize the potential value of

crowdsourcing. Evidence suggests that governments

can utilize crowdsourcing to generate better public

services with lower costs, produce policy innovations,

and engage larger numbers of public participants

(Dutil 2015 ). Governments have evolved quickly

to master these new online platforms with proper

management and coordination through a trial-and-

error process (Brabham 2015 ). This article is an initial

step toward examining the global exponential growth

of crowdsourcing by governments.

Existing studies discuss four types of functions

that can be crowdsourced in the public sector: (1)

information generation, (2) service coproduction, (3)

solution creation, and (4) policy making (Nam 2012 ).

Governments can generate information from citizens

to improve public services through crowdsourcing.

For instance, the Citizen Science Alliance ’ s Galaxy

Zoo in collaboration with NASA (Tokarchuk, Cuel,

and Zamarian 2012 ), engaged the public to provide

information about the classification of galaxies.

Another important goal of crowdsourcing is to involve

citizens in the production of public services, such as

Peer to Patent (Noveck 2009 ), which involves lay

stakeholders in the research and review of patent

applications. Furthermore, government agencies adopt

crowdsourcing for solution creation, such as Challenge.

gov (Mergel and Desouza 2013 ) and Next Stop Design

(Brabham 2012 ), which send open calls for proposals to

solve specific public problems. Finally, crowdsourcing is

applied in the policy-making process (Prpić, Taeihagh,

and Melton 2015 ). For instance, governments

incorporate public participation into policy making,

such as Future Melbourne (Liu 2016 ), federal agencies’

rulemaking in Finland (Aitamurto and Landemore

2015 ), and the eRulemaking Initiative in the United

States (Epstein, Newhart, and Vernon 2014 ).

Theory to Practice