Crowdsourcing: A new tool for policy-making?

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people are used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process, such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Other forms of crowdsourcing have been neglected in policy-making, with a few exceptions. This article examines crowdsourcing as a tool for policy-making, and explores the nuances of the technology and its use and implications for different stages of the policy process. The article addresses questions surrounding the role of crowdsourcing and whether it can be considered as a policy tool or as a technological enabler and investigates the current trends and future directions of crowdsourcing. Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Public Policy, Policy Instrument, Policy Tool, Policy Process, Policy Cycle, Open Collaboration, Virtual Labour Markets, Tournaments, Competition

Understanding the Roles of Communities in Volunteered Geographic Information Projects

As a society we are now more connected than ever before. Citizens interact with each other and form virtual communities based on a common interest or being involved in certain cultural, political, intellectual, or other issues. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is generated when citizens annotate content from social media and smart devices. OpenStreetMap is a famous example of a VGI project with a very large community of contributors. This chapter examines this community and investigates the types of contributors and interactions amongst members of OSM. Our results show that there are very small groups of individuals creating and editing over 85 % of all OSM objects in three casestudy cities. Editing and contribution behaviour is mostly steady and consistent over time except during months where OSM ‘mapping parties’ occur or when freely available spatial data is bulk imported into OSM. The paper also provides results of analysis into the social interaction between contributors to OSM where we show that a very small number of contributors are actively editing and maintaining the data submitted by other contributors. This indicates that most contributors work exclusively on their own data and rarely edit the work of others. Overall this paper will be of interest to LBS practitioners considering using OSM as a source of spatial data for LBS applications

Insights into the Trilateral Relationship of Crowdfunding Campaigns, Open Source and Communities

Part 1: Organizational Aspects of OSS ProjectsInternational audienceCrowdfunding campaigns enable individuals to bring their ideas to production by appealing directly to the end-market and the global community. A number of these projects are open source, seemingly, counteracting the funding process. We interviewed founders, developers and managers of 13 crowdfunding initiatives involving open source products to determine how communities, crowdfunding campaigns and open source are associated. Our findings verified the existence of common characteristics among the cases, the emergence of a family-like relationship between the organizers and the community, as well as the community perceived as a success factor. We suggest that the development of certain niche products inherently leads to the adoption of open source as a licensing model and crowdfunding as the capital gathering process