Citizen sourcing

Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and to (2) tapping into the citizenry’s collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:

• The use of ideation tools by government agencies to collect ideas and suggestions from the public
• The adoption of citizen reporting platforms, such as for crime or emergency response information
• The government monitoring of social media, such as Twitter, for situational awareness, such as with regard to natural disasters

Citizen sourcing has gained prominence as part of the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative and is seen, in the words of Vivek Kundra, as a way of driving “innovation by tapping into the ingenuity of the American people”^[1] to solve those problems that are too big for government to solve on its own. Similarly, David Cameron of the British Conservatives believes that citizen sourcing mechanisms and the advent of Web 2.0 technologies will help usher in “the next age of government” by truly enabling citizens to act on John Kennedy’s historic call to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” ^[2]

History

Citizen sourcing is a derivative of the term crowdsourcing. “Citizen” is used instead of “crowd” to emphasis its governmental application and civic purpose. Citizen sourcing is a new take on the concept of the coproduction of public services by service users and communities enabled by the maturation of Web 2.0 participatory technologies.

Examples

Citizen reporting

The City of Boston provides a Citizens Connect iPhone App that allows constituents to report various services requests, including for removing graffiti, filling potholes, and fixing traffic lights. A similar system, SeeClickFix, has been adopted in a number of cities across the United States.

Disaster response

Online communities of citizens such as the Crisis Commons (see Crisis camp) and the International Network of Crisis Mappers provide assistance to professional responders on the ground by performing data-driven tasks, such as locating missing persons (see, for instance, Person finder), converting satellite imagery into street maps (see, for instance, OpenStreetMap), and reporting and processing actionable citizen reports of needs and damage (see, for instance, the Ushahidi platform).

Patent examination

The Peer-to-Patent system enables citizens to assist the United States Patent and Trademark Office in evaluating the validity of patent applications.

Notes

1. ^ "How Open Gov Datasets Affect Parents and Consumers". White House Open Government Blog. 2010-01-23. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/23/why-open-gov-matters-you. 
2. ^ "David Cameron: The next age of government". TED. 2010-02-01. http://www.ted.com/talks/david_cameron.html.