Waking Up a Sleeping Giant: Lessons from Two Extended Pilots to Transform Public Organizations by Internal Crowdsourcing

Digital transformation is a main driver for change, evolution, and disruption in organizations. As digital transformation is not solely determined by technological advancements, public environments necessitate changes in organizational practice and culture alike. A mechanism that seeks to realize employee engagement to adopt innovative modes of problem-solving is internal crowdsourcing, which flips the mode of operation from top-down to bottom-up. This concept is thus disrupting public organizations, as it heavily builds on IT-enabled engagement platforms that overcome the barriers of functional expertise and routine processes. Within this paper, we reflect on two design science projects that were piloted for six months within public organizations. We derive insights on the sociotechnical effects of internal crowdsourcing on organizational culture, social control, individual resources, motivation, and empowerment. Furthermore, using social cognitive theory, we propose design propositions for internal crowdsourcing, that guide future research and practice-oriented approaches to enable innovation in public organizations

Enablers in Crisis Information Management: A Literature Review

Social media often plays a central role in crisis informatics as it is an important source for assessing, understanding, and locating crises quickly and accurately. In addition, social media enables actors to react more effectively and efficiently when managing crises. However, enablers of crisis information management have not been carved out explicitly in a systematic view. Therefore, we perform a literature review to synthesize the existing literature on crisis information management with a focus on technical enablers and their classification into the crisis-management phases. As our results show, searching for crisis informatics mostly results in social media-related publications. We found that Twitter is one of the most important technical enablers but that research on other social media platforms is underrepresented. Also, most publications center on the post-crisis phases of crisis management, leaving out the pre-crisis phases

Crowdsourcing: A Geographic Approach to Public Engagement, The Programmable City Working Paper 6

In this paper we examine three geographic crowdsourcing models, namely: volunteered geographic information (VGI), citizen science (CS) and participatory mapping (PM) (Goodchild, 2007; Audubon Society, 1900; and Peluso, 1995). We argue that these geographic knowledge producing practices can be adopted by governments to keep databases up to date (Budhathoki et al., 2008), to gain insight about natural resources (Conrad and Hilchey, 2011), to better understand the socio-economy of the people it governs (Johnston and Sieber, 2013) and as a form of data-based public engagement. The paper will be useful to governments and public agencies considering using geographic crowdsourcing in the future. We begin by defining VGI, CS, PM and crowdsourcing. Two typologies are then offered as methods to conceptualize these practices and the Kitchin (2014) data assemblage framework is proposed as a method by which state actors can critically examine their data infrastructures. A selection of exemplary VGI, CS and PM from Canada and the Republic of Ireland are discussed and the paper concludes with some high level recommendations for administrations considering a geographic approach to crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing: A Geographic Approach to Public Engagement, The Programmable City Working Paper 6

In this paper we examine three geographic crowdsourcing models, namely: volunteered geographic information (VGI), citizen science (CS) and participatory mapping (PM) (Goodchild, 2007; Audubon Society, 1900; and Peluso, 1995). We argue that these geographic knowledge producing practices can be adopted by governments to keep databases up to date (Budhathoki et al., 2008), to gain insight about natural resources (Conrad and Hilchey, 2011), to better understand the socio-economy of the people it governs (Johnston and Sieber, 2013) and as a form of data-based public engagement. The paper will be useful to governments and public agencies considering using geographic crowdsourcing in the future. We begin by defining VGI, CS, PM and crowdsourcing. Two typologies are then offered as methods to conceptualize these practices and the Kitchin (2014) data assemblage framework is proposed as a method by which state actors can critically examine their data infrastructures. A selection of exemplary VGI, CS and PM from Canada and the Republic of Ireland are discussed and the paper concludes with some high level recommendations for administrations considering a geographic approach to crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing defense acquisition programs

MBA Professional Report. Crowdsourcing solutions have the potential to meet the Army's modernization goals. With the rise of improved Internet access and online resources, crowdsourcing has been increasing in popularity since 2006. The benefits of crowdsourcing have been visible in commercial industry and can apply to Department of Defense (DOD) Acquisition Programs. This report identifies the overall use of crowdsourcing, looks at cases in the DOD and in industry, and analyzes strengths and weaknesses. Our findings consist of crowdsourcing strategies that can benefit the DOD and include prize competitions, open dialogue, and open-data collaboration. Integrating the crowd-force with defense contractors through online collaboration platforms can speed up the time required to find solutions and reduce program costs. Barriers include senior-level leaderships' reluctance to change, risks associated with opening up the DOD to crowdsourcing, and the DOD's unwillingness to adapt to new ways of innovation. Recommendations include that Congress pass laws directing the use of open innovation, crowdsourcing, and implementing directives across federal agencies. The best area for the DOD to implement crowdsourcing focuses on design, forecasting, and software. Lessons learned allow for better use of crowdsourcing in new modernization goals and efforts in reducing costs and fielding equipment.http://archive.org/details/crowdsourcingdef1094556900Major, United States ArmyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described

Crowdsourcing Design: A Synthesis of Literatures

Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon emerging in various sectors and industries that provides an opportunity for governments to collaborate with the public to generate information, deliver public services, or facilitate policy innovation. This review paper synthesizes prior research and practices on crowdsourcing from a variety of disciplines and focuses on the purpose, crowd, motivation, process design and outcomes. A process map for governments to design crowdsourcing is generated and three key actions are highlighted, namely incentive design, communication, and information aggregation