The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing

TL;DR

This paper reviews and categorizes research on crowdsourcing techniques in policy making, analyzing their characteristics, trade-offs, and alignment with policy stages to identify trends and gaps in the field.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework categorizing crowdsourcing methods and maps them onto policy cycle stages, providing a comprehensive overview of the research landscape.

Findings

Identifies seven universal characteristics of crowdsourcing techniques.

Maps crowdsourcing methods to different policy cycle stages.

Highlights research gaps and overlaps in policy crowdsourcing literature.

Abstract

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