The representational aspect of what we in the large part of organised political discourse have now come to accept in ontological terms as ‘Representative Democracy’ has exercised the thinking of many an eminent political thinker for the beter part of the last century. Even in praxis the extremely limited nature of the engagement of the ordinary citizen in routine decisions of governance has often led to cynical expostulations about the very keystone notion of modern democracy of allowing a handful of representatives to hold forth on matters of governance affecting millions.
When one looks at the numbers, they do look slightly absurd. For example, if one were to ask a rather simplistic question ~ putting aside for the moment other concomitant matters ~ about how many people in India elected their representatives in 2018, the number comes to be a mind-boggling 1.7 million approximately. It is easy to imagine how such a number, taken off context, may lead even the staunchest of votaries for parliamentary governance to doubt their convictions about the representative nature of the system. Can one representative person be thought of as bestowed with the omniscience and felicities as to be able to typify the aspirations of such a vast multitude?
Is it possible for such a ratio to allow an MP to know his/her constituents and be their true voice when issues on their fates are deliberated upon? These questions, and others in the same vein, taken collectively would ideally represent the point de depart for the debate on coming up with some mechanisms that would broaden the engagement of citizens in matters of governance, above and beyond signing off with casting a ballot every five years. The concept of canvassing the views of citizens on individual aspects of governance is as old as the story of democracy, going back to the ***agora*** of the Hellenistic age. Those were the halcyon days when every citizen of the small city-states potentially had a say in what laws he would abide by. This tradition of ‘Direct Democracy’ flew quite steadily down the ages since then, and after the Enlightenment/ Renaissance age, got institutionalised in the modern age of democracy as something called a ‘Referendum’ in the mature political system of Northern Europe.
But the prerequisites of a system that will lend itself extensively to such an elicitation of opinion are not ubiquitous: a small enough representational area and population for effective garnering of individual opinion, high levels of political socialisation and education, similar cultural and linguistic persuasions. It is quite apparent why such a practice has been localised in the very small nations of Scandinavia, the cantons of Switzerland and in very few local councils of the New England states of the US. There did not seem to be any viable mechanism to introduce a system for directly ascertaining the views of individual citizens in a continental sized entity like India.
Till now. The most eloquent, albeit lengthy, definition of crowdsourcing is “the capability of a large network of people, termed as “crowd”, networked through Web technologies, to solutions to difficult problems and design activities, which were previously performed exclusively by professionals, is gradually recognised by management researchers and practitioners. This is referred to as “collective intelligence”, which is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real-time, and resulting in the effective mobilisation of skills.” We have been familiar with the term “distributed computing /processing” for sometime… well, at least technology geeks were.
Simply put, it’s a vast array of computers working together to solve a complex problem which would be cumbersome for a single or a few machines to successfully take on. Crowdsourcing can be used as an analogous instance of gathering ideas, opinions, facts and information from a vast multitude of people, from a whole spectrum of backgrounds, on some specific question or problem. The premise for this is that often enough, a vast array of opinions and ideas, optimally channeled, can be far more enlightening and proficient in problem-solving than a small group of focused experts. Even though the private sector around the world has been using crowdsourcing in a variety of ways and scales since the 1970s, starting from the very basic market survey exercises, to the very sophisticated real time model designing by automobile companies by factoring in ideas from the market in recent times, the idea remained an anathema for the public sector.
As discussed in the introductory passage, conventional democratic governance has been often of late dragged over the coals for being unresponsive and callous to, and unheeding of ‘true’ public opinion and sentiments. Governments have been castigated as top-heavy leviathan bureaucracies that exist only for the cause of self-perpetuation. Fortunately, the very reason why private companies are now intensely engaging with the public in real time on almost the entire spectrum of their respective value chains is the same that will now allow governments in vast countries like India to engage people much more actively with the process of governance. The massive penetration of the internet and internet enabled data services, even in distant and economically challenged places, and the facile interface of most web based applications that allows even educationally deprived people to use them with relative ease, now has piqued the interest of policy makers across the world to toy with the idea that citizens’ participation can actually lead to better policies.
Crowdsourcing in the public space has become even more important, especially in the mature democracies, for the fact that since the 1970s there has been a declining trend in public participation on public issues. People, especially the younger generation, express a very low level of emotional and intellectual investment on issues of governance, and are engrossed with the far more exciting trends in technology. This has led to a very steep erosion in the representative nature of democratic governance, and has in turn allowed gigantic bureaucracies like the EU Secretariat in Brussels to hijack most of the decisions that used to be taken by elected representatives, and on the other hand has allowed illiberal demagogues across the world to occupy a very large space in the political sphere. This duality has given rise to twin dichotomies of “undemocratic liberalism and illiberal democracy”.
Crowdsourcing, using the younger generation’s penchant for the internet and the fact that it can be used as a platform for deepening public participation in very inexpensive, yet effective terms, is a potential remedy for the malaise described. Most of the mature democratic governments across the world produce and publish thousands of pages of data on policies being implemented and other concomitant facts about day-to-day governance for public consumption. This process has gathered momentum over the last quarter of the last century, as public discontent grew against the habitual obfuscation of governments in allowing any scrutiny of its internal workings. Demands for more transparency have led to the relaxation of restrictive laws on keeping government workings classified.
In India, the jettisoning of the Official Secrets Act, 1923 and the ushering in of the Right to Information Act, 2005, was a landmark which recognised the citizen’s right to know about government’s policies and their implementation. But this is merely a unilateral process, with the government playing the role of data supplier. There was no effort to gather feedback from the public on the information thus given to it. Crowdsourcing remedies this unilateral situation by the introduction of ‘social entrepreneurship’, by encouraging the public at large to generate innovations in the public policy space.
This platform fires up a lot of unused potential for the garnering of ideas that perhaps policymakers, wearing the metaphorical institutional lenses, are not able to generate, but due to lack of perspective. It also effectively captures the fringe opinions that usually go unheeded in mainstream policy making. Statistically put, if the vast amount of data about any existing or draft policy that can possibly be captured on this platform, analysed and graphically represented as a Bell Curve, the results can indicate the popular acceptance of the policy (by seeing the spread around the midpoint across two Standard Deviations, wide and gently sloped, or narrow and steep, respectively), the partisan division about the policy (by the skewness and kurtosis) and the measure of responsiveness, positive or negative, about the policy. The horizons that have now been opened up by the quantum development of Big Data analytics makes it possible to put crowdsourced data through almost any required representative analysis.
(To be 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)