The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing
This work addresses the need for a comprehensive overview of policy crowdsourcing research, identifying gaps and overlaps for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature without introducing new empirical results.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding the research landscape on crowdsourcing for policy making by collecting and categorizing extant literature within a new framework based on fundamental typologies, resulting in a systematic analysis of trade-offs and alignment with policy stages.
What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policy making? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative trade-offs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy, and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature. KEYWORDS: crowdsourcing, policy cycle, crowdsourcing trade-offs, policy processes, policy stages, virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration