Crowd Capital in Governance Contexts

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first dataset of IT-mediated Crowd applications in governance, analyzing their distribution, actors, and resource types to understand their implications for politics and policy.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive dataset and exploratory analysis of IT-mediated Crowds in governance, highlighting diversity in actors, geographic distribution, and resource generation.

Findings

Diverse actors engage in governance Crowdsourcing.

Applications are present on all continents.

Crowd-derived resources span at least ten governance sectors.

Abstract

To begin to understand the implications of the implementation of IT-mediated Crowds for Politics and Policy purposes, this research builds the first-known dataset of IT-mediated Crowd applications currently in use in the governance context. Using Crowd Capital theory and governance theory as frameworks to organize our data collection, we undertake an exploratory data analysis of some fundamental factors defining this emerging field. Specific factors outlined and discussed include the type of actors implementing IT-mediated Crowds in the governance context, the global geographic distribution of the applications, and the nature of the Crowd-derived resources being generated for governance purposes. The findings from our dataset of 209 on-going endeavours indicates that a wide-diversity of actors are engaging IT-mediated Crowds in the governance context, both jointly and severally, that these endeavours can be found to exist on all continents, and that said actors are generating Crowd-derived resources in at least ten distinct governance sectors. We discuss the ramifications of these and our other findings in comparison to the research literature on the private-sector use of IT-mediated Crowds, while highlighting some unique future research opportunities stemming from our work.