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/ Canadian Government Executive
// February 2016
W
ith the inexorable expan-
sion of internet, and the ad-
vent of highly efficient com-
puters and software, the
private sector has successfully exploited
“crowdsourcing,” a concept coined to de-
scribe a new approach to find talent and
put it to work. Typically, the label has been
given to a strategy where a firm seeks ser-
vices from anonymous members of society
who, in turn, will donate time and effort
under certain conditions.
Crowdsourcing? Towards
a Hard Definition
Although it has been changed dramati-
cally by technology, the idea of the state
relying on citizens for services is not new.
Governments in all areas and at all levels
have at times used this instrument to re-
cruit soldiers, firefighters and searchers
or to help informants report malfeasance
anonymously.
Daren Brabham, of the University of
Southern California, called for a much
more disciplined use of the word in his
2013 book
Crowsdsourcing
. He emphasized
that crowdsourcing was a power-sharing
relationship between an organization (he
only considered private sector corpora-
tions) and the public. He identified four
key ingredients: 1) an organization that
“has a task it needs performed”; 2) a com-
munity willing to do the work; 3) an online
environment that allows the work to take
place and, 4) “mutual benefit for the orga-
nization and the community.”
Brabham’s interpretation even prompted
him to reject the inclusion of peer-produced
projects such as Wikipedia (often seen as
the poster child of crowdsourcing) because
of its absence of a clear lead in the project,
an actual commissioner of the work. Much
of Brabham’s restrictive use of the term
“crowdsourcing” should be adapted to the
public sector—the notion of a governing
authority, the availability of an anonymous
community willing to do work, and the no-
tion of a “mutual benefit” in particular—in
order to distinguish these activities from
others and to define their place in the in-
ventory of state instruments.
Brabham’s tight definition has to be
welcomed as governments consider new
Leadership
Crowdsourcing:
The Old Instrument
Whose Time has Come
Patrice
Dutil