white paper: practical crowdsourcing for civic engagment

PRACTICAL CROWDSOURCING FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

IDEASCALE I IDEAVIBES

Engaging the Ci+zen Diaspora Crowdsourcing & Civic Behavior Low voter par+cipa+on High social media ac+vity The Best of Both Worlds Offline Engagement Online Engagement Prac+cal Applica+ons of Crowdsourcing for Civic Engagement Crowdsource to Solve Problems Crowdsource to Get the Job Done Crowdsource to Increase Par+cipa+on Crowdsource to be More Transparent Crowdsource to spur change Benefits of Crowdsourcing Long-‐Lived Budget-‐Friendly Immediate Transparent The Crowd is Talking. Are You Listening?

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Practical Crowdsourcing For Civic Engagement

Civic engagement is challenging to accomplish in a society where individuals no longer

congregate around a few common public spaces, such as a town hall or church. It is ever more

difficult for governments, citizen-focused organizations and elected representatives to reach

constituents who divide their discretionary time between a wide variety of specific social

groups, various sports and hobbies, travel and more. But, social media does provide a cost-

effective and efficient tool to reach this citizen diaspora.

Through social media, individuals expand their social networks globally while bringing the

entire world closer to them—making it a smaller, more accessible place. By taking advantage of

the underpinnings of social media behavior and Open Source principles, crowdsourcing

harnesses the ideas of large, disparate groups of people (citizens) to gather input and create

awareness that leads to change.

In this paper, I will demonstrate how of crowdsourcing can be employed to build participation in

citizen engagement campaigns.

Engaging the Citizen Diaspora

3PRACTICAL CROWDSOURCING FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

“...social media has demonstrated its capacity to compel social movements and create large-‐scale change quickly.”

Citizen Engagement Laboratory (Berkley)2

Reality talent shows and websites that enable viewer-audience voting have proven that

individuals are naturally driven to give their input when they can see the immediate results of

their contributions. Voting is a proven way of enabling participation and it is a yardstick of civic

engagement—it is also a key component in many crowdsourcing activities.

The American Psychological Association has defined civic engagement as, “Individual and

collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern.” The kinds of

activities that comprise civic engagement “can take many forms, from individual voluntarism to

organizational involvement to electoral participation...Civic engagement encompasses a range

of specific activities such as working in a soup kitchen, serving on a neighborhood [sic]

association, writing a letter to an elected official or voting.”1

Crowdsourcing & Civic Behavior


Civic participation is critical to involving citizens in learning about, contributing to, supporting

or improving issues that affect them, such as decisions about public spaces, large public

expenditures, solving problems in communities, and accomplishing tasks through volunteerism.

Crowdsourcing compliments these goals by providing organizations and governments with a

means of engaging individual awareness and input on a large scale. It builds upon citizens’

natural inclinations towards creativity, competition and involvement to generate powerful ideas

and solutions.

Crowdsourcing is particularly relevant for civic engagement efforts because it bridges the

divide between two current phenomena in civic behavior: low voter participation and high

social media activity.

Voter turnout in the most recent Canadian federal election and the United States presidential

elections saw a slight increase over previous elections. Both campaigns engaged more social

media elements than ever before, which may have contributed to the slight lift in participation.

Yet, the number of voters is still too low: the 2011 Canadian federal election saw a voter

turnout of 61.4%3, and the 2008 American presidential election saw a turnout of 63.7%4. With

nearly 40% of the population not voting, the outcome of these elections does not necessarily

represent the overall wishes of an entire population.

Low voter participation

The number of people using social media websites grows daily, including an increasing number

of adults. Social media usage data from May 2011 collected by Ad Age indicates that nearly

36% of male Facebook users and more than 27% of female Facebook users fall between the

ages of 30 and 54.5

These individuals are using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to connect with family members,

friends, people who share similar interests, or who work in the same industry. Canadians in

particular spend a great deal of time online—more than people from 11 other countries

(including the U.S. and U.K.), according to a 2011 comScore survey:

High social media activity

• 25 billion: number of tweets

sent on TwiMer in 2010

• 100 million: new accounts

added on TwiMer in 2010

• 175 million: people on TwiMer

as of September 2010

• 600 million: people on Facebook

at the end of 2010

• 250 million: new people on

Facebook in 2010

• 30 billion: pieces of content

(links, notes, photos, etc.) shared

on Facebook per month

• 70%: share of Facebook’s user base

• located outside the United States

• 20 million: number of Facebook

apps installed each day

• 2 billion: number of videos

watched per day on YouTube

• 5 billion: photos hosted by

Flickr (September 2010)

• 3000+: photos uploaded per

minute to Flickr

• 3+ billion: photos uploaded

per month to Facebook

“The study found that Canadians spent an average of 43.5 hours online in the fourth quarter of 2010, nearly double the average of 23.1 hours surfed by the 11 countries surveyed… The study also tracked Canadians’ social networking, with Facebook (seven per cent), Twitter (11 per cent) and LinkedIn (35 per cent) all claiming significant increases in unique visitors.”7


TWITTER FACEBOOK VIDEOS & PHOTOS

Given these numbers, it is certain that citizens can be—and should be engaged with online, and

that social media activity must be embraced and used to connect with and reach out to citizens.

Consider these additional statistics regarding social media use in 20106:


In order to improve citizen engagement, elected representatives and civic organizations must

combine tried-and-true traditional methods of campaigning with more innovative approaches

that reflect these changes in citizen behavior. Barack Obama’s campaign during the 2008 US

presidential election was one of the first large-scale political campaigns to do this—I’ll discuss

that campaign later in this paper.

Organizations, government agencies and governments can engage with their audience through

a number of offline and online mediums.

The Best of Both Worlds

The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a study called The Current State of Civic

Engagement in America, which outlines some of the various offline methods that citizens use to

contact politicians at various levels8:

• Contact a government official in person, by phone or by letter

• Sign a paper petition

• Send a letter to the editor through the mail

• Make a political contribution in person, by phone or through the mail

• Communicate with a civic/political group by face-to-face meetings, print letter or

newsletter or telephone

• Some of the offline methods that politicians use to reach out to citizens include:

• Door-to-door canvassing

• Mass mail-outs or flyer drop-offs

• Town hall meetings, in-person Q & A sessions, public debates

• Interviews

These tactics represent traditional offline activities that are still important elements of citizen

engagement, particularly among the over-40 voter population.

Offline engagement


The Internet has made way for new civic engagement opportunities. As Nicol Tuner-Lee notes9:

“The Internet has become the new platform for freedom of speech, and the expression of civic

ideas. With more than 66 percent of Americans online, virtual micro-communities, or niche web

portals, have made it easier for people to deliberately seek out and sustain relationships with

those who share similar interests, opinions, and backgrounds. Citizens can pick and choose

both the online destination where they want to share, and the preferred format to

communicate their opinions whether through a blog, video, podcast, or tweet. Before the

Internet, these ideas were shared at community town hall and block club meetings.”

According to research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, citizens are using these

online methods to communicate with their local leaders:

• Send an email to a government official

• Sign a petition online

• Email a letter to the editor

• Make a political contribution on the Internet

• Communicate with a civic/political group by email, text messaging, instant messaging,

using the group’s website or using a social networking site

Online Engagement

Author Jeff Howe was one of the first people to coin the term, crowdsourcing. The practice

applies Open Source principles to fields outside of software by taking a task traditionally

performed by one person and outsourcing it to a large group of people. Crowdsourcing is like

an open call for ideas.

Practical Applications of Crowdsourcing

for Civic Engagement


Crowdsourcing can engage audiences in projects, challenges and decisions. It gathers the

collective wisdom of large numbers of people to arrive at outcomes and conclusions that are

more accurate than, or otherwise superior to, the wisdom of any individual.

James Surowiecki, in his 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than

the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations,

acknowledges that not all crowds are wise—for example, a crazed mob.

He identifies these four attributes of a wise crowd:

• Diversity of opinion—each contributor/source has private information or interpretation

of the topic

• Independence—contributors’ opinions are not determined by those of others

• Decentralization—contributors can specialize by drawing on local knowledge

• Aggregation—a mechanism is in place to gather private judgements into a collective

decision

Effective crowdsourcing leverages these attributes to gain more accurate insights into

problems and solutions than can be achieved through discussions with individuals or small local

groups. These are some ways that you can engage a crowd to achieve civic engagement goals:

Crowdsourcing is frequently used as a problem-solving tool and can therefore be a tool to

improve results-oriented civic engagement. For example, some cities and communities have

embraced crowdsourcing as a means of incorporating residents into decision making and

getting them to help solve problems. Civic leaders may be hesitant to use social media tools

because they are afraid they will be used as centres rather than remaining focused on the task

at hand. Crowdsourcing is ideal for overcoming this concern because it can be highly specific.

For example, it can be used to have citizens first vote to determine the highest priority problem

to solve, then to have them vote on solutions to the problem—including solutions that they and

others post.

Crowdsource to solve problems

Crowdsourcing relies on social media behavior (such as sharing and liking) to build awareness

among and get the members of the crowd’s own networks involved. Through increased

participation, the impact of a crowdsourcing campaign becomes stronger. It can also be used to

solve issues in a very cost-effective way compared to hiring market research firms, or in concert

with traditional market research. Tapping the wisdom of the crowd brings new ideas to the

table very rapidly and at low cost. It also attracts experts who can offer their services, expertise

and advice to help get the job done in the way citizens want it done.

Crowdsource to get the job done


Crowdsourcing is very accessible and makes it easier for individual citizens to be heard,

because posting an idea or voting for an idea is very easy to do. Even busy individuals who are

not able to participate in community organizations or attend interest group meetings can have

a voice through crowdsourcing. It is also a viable tool to engage younger citizens who have

grown up with the Internet and social media as an integral part of their day-to-day lives.

Barack Obama’s 2008 federal election campaign in the United States offers one of the greatest

examples to date of using social media and online collaboration to foster greater participation:

“Most recently, the 2008 election demonstrated how the Internet could drive public opinion

and voter participation. President Barack Obama’s campaign used online tools and social

networks in a way that contributed to his victory as the first African American President of the

United States. The Obama campaign used the Internet to raise half a billion dollars, the largest

amount of contributions to a political operation ever received through online donations. His

website, MyBarackObama.com, gathered thousands of e-mail addresses and, in turn, nurtured

a vast base of national volunteers supporting the campaign’s field tactics.”10

Crowdsource to increase participation

Today’s consumers demand transparency from major corporations, governments and elected

officials. Taxpayers want to know where their dollars are being spent and to ensure that public

funds are not being wasted. They also want to be included in the decision-making process.

Transparency is also critical to good governance—another quality that citizens demand from

major corporations and our governing bodies.

Crowdsource to be more transparent


Crowdsourcing can be used to improve access to information; it can ensure that information is

timely, accurate, complete and relevant to citizen inquiries; it can disseminate messages very

quickly to large audiences; and, it makes it possible to incorporate citizens in the decision

making process. Some organizations use crowdsourcing as a customer feedback tool—the same

concept can be applied to civic life as well, giving citizens easy access to the lines of

communication and empowering them to contribute by giving them a voice.

Crowdsourcing has applications far beyond the campaign moment: it can be used in everyday

activities to continually engage with citizens and address real-time issues. Crowdsourcing

gathers a wealth of information, ideas and opinions that leaders and citizens never used to have

access to. As Diana Scearce writes:

“Throughout history, social change has been possible only through the contributions and

dedication of many citizens. Today’s network-centric engagement builds on existing know-how,

drawing in particular on grassroots community organizing and the open-source software

movement.”11

Crowdsourcing can be used to engage individuals and grassroots community organizations in

meaningful change at any time.

Crowdsource to spur change

In addition to the capabilities discussed above, crowdsourcing offers a number of benefits over

traditional methods of civic engagement, including:

Budget-Friendly Crowdsourcing uses networks of people and social media tools to spread the word about

campaigns, projects and ideas. This makes it possible to create a far-reaching effort that

stretches campaign dollars. It can also be used to improve the return on investment of

traditional campaigns. By bringing people’s attention to crowdsourcing campaigns in offline

engagement activities (for example, calls to action to “go online and vote for the change you

want” printed on campaign pamphlets or referenced in TV ads), the value and ROI of traditional

engagement tools can be increased.

Benefits of Crowdsourcing


While door-to-door and telephone campaigns provide representatives with immediate

feedback from citizens, these methods by necessity reach only a small percentage of the

population. Combining these activities with crowdsourcing provides governments and

politicians with a more complete picture of opinions and preferences. Crowdsourcing

campaigns can deliver a broad understanding of general opinions very quickly—information

that can be leveraged during walk-abouts and phone campaigns to dig deeper into citizens’

opinions and to validate crowdsourcing campaign findings one-on-one.

Immediate

As discussed earlier in this paper, crowdsourcing provides citizens with a new kind of

transparency into government. It does so by enabling greater access to information and decision-

making processes, as well as providing a platform for citizens to participate in those processes.

Transparent

Everyday, citizens are having conversations about their government and its decisions. Being

able to tap into those conversations and gather meaningful opinions that can be used for

decision-making is critical to the effectiveness of governments, civic organizations and elected

officials. Crowdsourcing—and other social media—are tools that ignite conversations and turn

bystanders into active participants in government.

Crowdsourcing is a key component in the digital democracy—a social reality in which “the divide

between media [message] producers and consumers has dissolved and citizen [produced]

media rules… While before citizens had to rally for mainstream media attention to catch the

ears of politicians, now it is easier than ever before for citizens to launch awareness campaigns

and get their message heard by the masses.”12

Through its participatory nature, crowdsourcing gives governments and elected

representatives useful insights and valuable information that would otherwise be too costly or

otherwise unfeasible to gather. Able to reach a more diverse citizen base than traditional

methods of civic engagement, crowdsourcing can provide equally valuable input and direction

and can be used to enhance the value of traditional tools. Perhaps most importantly,

crowdsourcing expands the reach of a message or idea to networks beyond one’s immediate

crowd.

The Crowd is Talking, Are You Listening?

1. American Psychological Association. ìCivic Engagementî

webpage as of 03-05-11: http://www.apa.org/education/

undergrad/civic-engagement.aspx

2. Using Social Media to Organize Social Movements: A Look at

Citizen Engagement Laboratory. http://

www.triplepundit.com/2011/05/social-media-citizen-

engagement-laboratory/

3. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/

story/2011/05/03/cv-election-voter-turnout-1029.html,

CBC News, ëVoter turnout inches up to 61.4%í, May 3rd

2011.

4. http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p20-562.pdf, US

Census Bureau, Voting and Registration in the Election of

November 2008, May 2010

5. Carmichael, Matt. The Demographics of Social Media.

AdAgeBlogs, May16, 2011: http://adage.com/article/

adagestat/demographics-facebook-linkedin-myspace-

twitter/227569/

6. Coleman, Rebecca. State of the Union: Social Networking,

citing Royal Pingdom blog post, Internet 2010 in numbers:

http://www.rebeccacoleman.ca/2011/02/04/social-media/

state-of-the-union-social-networking-2/

7. Barber, Michael. Survey finds Canadians spending more

time online than those in other countries. The Vancouver Sun,

March 9, 2011: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Survey

+finds+Canadians+spending+more+time+online+than+those

+other+countries/4408671/story.html

8. Pew Internet & American Life Project. The Current State of

Civic Engagement in America, 2009: http://pewinternet.org/

Reports/2009/15--The-Internet-and-Civic-Engagement/2--

The-Current-State-of-Civic-Engagement-in-America.aspx?

r=1

9. Tuner-Lee, Nicol. The Challenge of Increasing Civic

Engagement in the Digital Age. The Future of Digital

Communications: Policy Perspectives: http://

twcresearchprogram.com/pdf/TWC%20Policy_Turner-

Lee.pdf

10. Tuner-Lee, Nicol. The Challenge of Increasing Civic

Engagement in the Digital Age. The Future of Digital

Communications: Policy Perspectives: http://

twcresearchprogram.com/pdf/TWC%20Policy_Turner-

Lee.pdf

11. Scearce, Diana. Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril

and Potential of Networks. Crowdsourcing.org, 2011:

http://www.crowdsourcing.org/document/connected-

citizens-the-power-peril-and-potential-of-networks-/3490

12. Campbell, Lisa. Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, mashups

and social change: http://www.mobilerevolutions.org/

Dotmocracy.pdf

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PRACTICAL CROWDSOURCING FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

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white paper: practical crowdsourcing for civic engagment

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