The Wisdom of Crowds in Government 2.0: Information Paradigm Evolution toward Wiki-Government

This essay, exploring the peer-to-peer collaborative atmosphere penetrating Wikivism, crowd-sourcing and open-source movement, identifies a new paradigm of public information as evolution toward Wiki-government. Citizen participants can collectively create public information via various platforms enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. Under the new participatory paradigm that a large number of individual citizens and government cocreate public information, not only do Wiki-oriented government agencies benefit from crowd wisdom, but citizens also learn from their colleague citizens. Crowd-sourcing to collect the wisdom of crowds is categorized into four types by matching between the quantity and the quality of participation: civic-sourcing, mob-sourcing, professionalism, and fiasco. For Wiki-government, a mass of well-informed and concerned participants in civic-sourcing make more desirable outcomes for a society than fewer, poorly-informed and unconcerned people. Thus, civic-sourcing promises greater advantages for government over professionalism and mob-sourcing. Three strategies for civic-sourcing (Wiki/open-sourcing, contest, or social networking) can be employed through different working mechanisms, with different motivators for participation, and under different approaches to human nature of key participants

Strategic Sourcing: Developing a Progressive Framework for Make-Or-Buy Decisions

Purpose: Make-or-buy decisions represent a critical dilemma faced by many firms. The appropriate decision between designing and manufacturing parts or services in-house, buying them from external providers or combining both is a fundamental firm process. This paper seeks to address this question by updating the traditional make-or-buy literature with new academic insights, developing a make-or-buy framework with a tool for its operationalisation to help managers evaluate sourcing decisions. Design/methodology/approach: First, a literature review of the principal theories and approaches about make-or-buy decisions is discussed. Second, the development of the make-or-buy framework is described and explained based on the results of qualitative interviews with practitioners and a set of interviews of an in-firm case study. Third, the results and the implementation of the framework are outlined. Findings: Our study not only validates the proposed framework through a set of in-firm make-or-buy decisions, but also provides a structure for its implementation and design a decision matrix with a pairwise comparison tool for helping practitioners to put the framework into practice. Research limitations/implications: This paper aims to contribute to the study of the make-or-buy literature in supply chain management through the graphical representation of why and how make-or-buy decisions are made. Interestingly, the paper presents relevant dimensions and factors to be studied and evaluates possible outcomes when approaching make-or-buy decisions. Originality/value: Our results suggest that practitioners should combine this framework with a pairwise comparison matrix and a multi-criteria decision analysis based on the TOPSIS methodology to assess strategic sourcing decisions

The Limitations and Possibilities of Co-Creation in the Public Domain of Rotterdam

A group of undergraduate bachelor students engaged in a project that focused on finding new co-creation methods for the public domain in Rotterdam. This paper describes the context in which the students worked, the findings they\ud made and the solutions they proposed. Their working process is compared with the work of the Freehouse foundation, a professional artist-run organization that focuses on empowering locals, socially and economically, by enlarging their involvement in the public domain. Subsequently the specifics of the discussed public domain, Rotterdam South, are pointed out. This is required because a very specific context is created by the combination of working class pride, lack of involved citizenship and severe social issues in the area. To conclude, the effect of the co-creative methods employed by the students and Freehouse on the\ud redistribution of power is compared with more traditional forms of citizen participation

Production costs, scope economies, and multi-client outsourcing under quantity competition

Two game models are developed based on production costs and scope economies to investigate the widely observed multi-client outsourcing (MCO) phenomenon. Analytical results demonstrate that outsourcers’ high in-house production costs and the advantage of scope economies motivate firms to outsource collectively to an independent vendor. Under certain conditions, if both firms make their outsourcing decisions simultaneously, collective outsourcing is one of the two equilibria; if both firms make decisions sequentially, collective outsourcing becomes the unique equilibrium. Furthermore, the comparative statics of the critical degree of scope economies are examined for the occurrence of MCO with regard to diverse market parameters. Finally, it is proved that market prices decrease as the degree of scope economies increases when MCO occurs. This research helps explain some widely observed phenomena such as malls, supply chain cities, and the China price

Capturing Ambiguity in Crowdsourcing Frame Disambiguation

FrameNet is a computational linguistics resource composed of semantic frames, high-level concepts that represent the meanings of words. In this paper, we present an approach to gather frame disambiguation annotations in sentences using a crowdsourcing approach with multiple workers per sentence to capture inter-annotator disagreement. We perform an experiment over a set of 433 sentences annotated with frames from the FrameNet corpus, and show that the aggregated crowd annotations achieve an F1 score greater than 0.67 as compared to expert linguists. We highlight cases where the crowd annotation was correct even though the expert is in disagreement, arguing for the need to have multiple annotators per sentence. Most importantly, we examine cases in which crowd workers could not agree, and demonstrate that these cases exhibit ambiguity, either in the sentence, frame, or the task itself, and argue that collapsing such cases to a single, discrete truth value (i.e. correct or incorrect) is inappropriate, creating arbitrary targets for machine learning.Comment: in publication at the sixth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) 201