Crowdsourcing for Local Governments: Research Review

Research Review is a place for me to bring you academic research that I think might be of interest or relevant to you all.  It is not necessarily the Cliff notes of the paper, but it will present some key findings or insights from the paper. In this installment of Research Review I am going to talk to you about crowdsourcing government services via the paper “A Framework for Using Crowdsourcing in Government” (Clark, Zingale, Logan, and Brudney 2016). So first things first, what is crowdsourcing?  The authors define it as: “Crowdsourcing is a general term used to describe a variety of ways that organizations, particularly in the for-profit sector, take advantage of the thoughts, inputs and ideas of the public” (pg 57). These days that usually means through the internet and/or phone. The authors characterize crowdsourcing as being less organized and focused than typical workgroups and that they tend to be used for gathering lower level ideas and suggestions—not to say that they are not important, just not necessarily “big picture.”  Of course the crowd matters too. There are times it makes sense to involve everyone, there are times that it does not.  One advantage is that there can