Crowdsourcing in policy making can be broadly used in the following scenarios (the list is illustrative, not exhaustive, with many possibly variations and hybrids in between): A) Active Crowdsourcing: These are cases when governments structure the sourcing process, in a way that will predefine how responses come in. This is done mostly to make the process of data analysis more facile, as the raw information is already segregated according to the dictates of the questionnaire.

There are also instances when the responses are allowed to be open-ended, without any rigours of a predefined structuring, but the responses can still be easily collated as the questions are preformulated. Most surveys and opinion polls come under the rubric of this kind of crowdsourcing. The two main themes for this segment are: a) assessing the efficacy and effectiveness of an existing policy; and b) gauging acceptance for a draft policy before implementation.

Governments of late are increasingly seeking the active and real time feedback about existing policies in operation, in terms of the popular sentiment. It is rather important to know in a popular democracy how a particular piece of legislation is perceived by the populace at large, and by extension, whether the government of the day is being seen in a favourable light or otherwise as a result of it. The crowdsourcing initiatives taken under the Swachh Bharat programme are a very good example of how popular participation on online platforms have gone on to vindicate the popularity of the premise that most Indians want a radical change in the way public cleanliness is addressed.

It has also had a positive spin-off effect on the way urban planning, especially sewerage and solid waste management are perceived by people at large, and how things could be improved with community participation. This participation will be more forthcoming if people feel that they are an integral part of the policymaking process. Governments are also actively seeking public opinions, views and ideas on draft legislation and schemes, again with the aim to gauge the potential acceptance of a contemplated piece of policy. The Smart Cities programme is perhaps a very good exemplar of the same in India, whereby the residents of the selected cities were asked to actively send in their ideas of how they want their cityscape to evolve in the days to come.

As the collected data was analysed, it was expectedly seen that people can be made to think much more innovatively if they are made part of the decision making loop. The Srikrishna Committee actively engaged and sought views of citizens while coming up with the draft Data Protection Bill, as a result of which much of the loopholes which were left in the official draft prepared by inhouse experts could be identified and addressed. While the jury is still out on how effective the draft bill is, or the validity of restrictions on cross-border data flow, the benefits of the consultative iterative process cannot be denied. B) Passive Crowdsourcing: A free and more evolved platform for crowdsourcing, which goes beyond structure questionnaires and restricted answering options, is Passive Crowdsourcing. There are two broad applications: a) Problem Posing and b) Open Search. Passive Crowdsourcing can be defined as “the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in a large number of predefined Web 2.0 social media sources (e.g. blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites, online forums, etc.) by citizens freely, without any initiation, stimulation or moderation through government postings, and the extraction from it of relevant knowledge, ideas and opinions.”

Throwing open a public policy problem to the open ended opinion of the citizenry can be a very emancipating act for the people, as well as an effectively informative way for the policymakers to address a truculent policy problem. There are quite a few policy-shadow areas in the governance of almost any country, which have not been given any or little attention. Similarly, new public policy problems arise as we ascend the technological matrix rapidly as a society. Such problems, either for the resilience of their complexity or for the novelty of their emergence, cannot be adequately addre-ssed by institutional expertise and government diktat, without popular participation.

Since these problems are neither sufficiently well understood nor do they present a facile handle to deal with dynamic complexities which are beyond the capacity of being addressed from any one perspective, governments are increasingly roping in the people to present their ideas on how to go about solving them. The problem of the massively generated e-waste world over has been one that governments have been grappling with for the past two decades, without really coming up with a viable solution. Unless there is enough public consciousness and participation in the solution matrix, the problem will not only remain, but grow exponentially. The concepts of crowdsourcing and ‘physical internet’ have been quite effectively demonstrated in China to be a model that can be replicated elsewhere.

This idea came about by posing the question of how citizens perceive the gravity of the problem of e-Waste and how effectively citizen participation can address the problem. Similarly, an open search of the social network of discussions about public policy problems could lead policymakers not only to be able to gauge the perceived seriousness of the same, but also give them useful pointers in designing solutions in which citizens would actively participate in. the Greek strategy for energy planning initiative trawled the Web 2.0 social media applications and came up with a matrix of public response to the different energy sources being used for power generation.

This would form a very informed backdrop against which to redefine the increasing role of renewable in the country’s energy map. As with every human endeavour, crowdsourcing too is not an unmixed blessing. In fact, a deeper analysis of the whole basic structure of any crowdsourcing system reveals several limitations and dangers that might give policymakers a respite before they start contemplating an initiative. Since it is beyond the scope of this paper to dwell at length on the various aspects of the subject, the several constraints, which are again not exhaustive, that any crowdsourcing platform may face are enumerated briefly below: 1. The most obvious problem is the amount of data that is generated, and the sifting out, so to speak, of the grain from the chaff. Even though Big Data analysis has come a long way and today’s very sophisticated platforms can be tailored for any kind of filters and analyses, the corruption of results due to the malicious data cannot be overruled. 2. Yascha Mounk has very eloquently pointed out the dangers of crowdsourcing in government, when wielded by conscience- challenged regimes, to manufacture support for their repressive agenda. He has also brought out very credibly how racist, religious and cultural schisms can be widened frighteningly by the proliferation of “Echo Chambers”, i.e. exponentially perpetuating opinions, which find their echo in Web 2.0 platforms. It is quite similar to what management jargon has as “GroupThink”, only much more insidious in scope. Just as the internet had helped in bringing about the emancipator ‘Arab Spring’, similarly has it proliferated xenophobia.

It is not hard to imagine how a demagogue can use a crowdsourcing platform for rabble rousing. An overdependence on such initiatives has the potential to seriously compromise the relevance of established institutions of policy-making, especially the representative legislatures. The example of Brexit may not be out of place while making this point, where an emotive referendum, which could hardly be said to have been representative, and which was arranged to bolster the political relevance of a party, won out over informed deliberations which should ideally have been carried out in the legislature. Crowdsourcing should not be even extended to the limits of its logic, imagine to be an alternative for the established institutions of democratic governance and policy making. Neither should it be thought of as a panacea for the present crisis of faith in democracy. What it offers is a useful tool, which if wielded judiciously, can pave the way for more informed and evidencebased policy making. And it is hoped that it will lend further credence to the truism that people are governed better, when they actively participate in governance.

(Concluded)

(The writer is an IAS officer, currently posted as Joint Secretary, Department of Food Processing Industries and Horticulture, Government of West Bengal. Views are personal and not the Government’s)