Citizensourcing (term coined by Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2008) describes the design and configuration of a new relationship between a government and its citizens, based on a set of web 2.0 principles mostly applied from crowdsourcing, co-creation and mass collaboration. Citizensourcing describes the act of taking a task that is traditionally performed by a designated civil servant and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of citizens in the form of an open call. This offers new ways of interactive public value creation and citizen co-creation by systematically integrating external actors into the governmental and administrative processes.

Needless to say, we all strive to innovate the public sector, and as a result, one logically wants to ask how these successful innovation principles in the private sector may inspire the public sector to reform administration and development processes. However, there are good reasons to be cautious of applying lessons from crowdsourcing to citizensourcing. In the evolving ecology of the social web, citizens seem to be more sensitive to government privacy concerns than corporate privacy concerns. Many governance problems are substantially different from the low-risk challenges of corporate advertising and product development. Enabling government-wide transformation is a challenge of a dramatically greater order than shifting practices within a single corporation. In their work, Lukensmeyer & Torres point out seven obstacles for successful citizensourcing in government.

• Resistant culture: Public official skepticism about the capacity of citizens to come to sound judgment on public policy matters.
• Pre-dominance of e-services: Bringing frontline services online while closing a window on broader e-participation reforms.
• Top-down government: The risk of incremental tinkering instead of thorough broad management reform changing the hierarchical settings.
• Representation: Citizen-sourcing through mass participation offers challenges to fundamental notions of representation and legitimacy.
• Producing reliable results: The preferences expressed by citizens who participate in a public input process should be valid and generalizable.
• Connecting input to outcome: For citizensourcing to work long-term, agencies must adopt clear guidelines for how they will receive public input and set expectations for how that information will be used.
• Surrendering agendas: In addressing a public challenge, significant control might already be wrested from the hands of citizens by civil servants reluctant to loose the agenda.

Our research project wishes to explore citizensourcing between public sector innovation and bureaucratic restraint. We want to explore the barriers preventing public sector innovation and the use of citizensourcing, and how to deal with the bureaucratic barriers of restraint. Can civil servants exploit the wisdom of crowds? Are citizens able to perform the same tasks as a designated civil servant? What bureaucratic, public management, and democratic challenges follow from this bottom up (outside-in) approach to open innovation?

Stay tuned for updates and please contribute with any thoughts and ideas.

Rasmus & Inge-Mai