Should nonprofits be crowdsourcing or “smart-sourcing”?

Written by Noah Flower on Friday, March 27th, 2009
Filed under Network tradecraft, News

As techPresident’s Pete Peterson reports in his piece titled “Government Needs Smart-sourcing, Not Crowdsourcing,” Clay Shirky has changed a few notes of his tune: whereas he previously was advocating for government to use Web 2.0 tools to pay more attention to public opinion writ large, he now believes that it should give greater weight to expert views. Peterson’s post builds on that idea, developing a critique of crowdsourced policy suggestions, along the lines of Cynthia Gibson’s earlier post on the stupidity of crowds: they’re too simple-minded, subject to capture by special interests who invest a disproportionate amount of effort, not representative of the public at large by virtue of low participation, and too insecure to enforce the rule of one vote per person. These flaws put the Obama administration in a tough bind, he points out, since they promised to listen to citizen input but ended up with a Citizen’s Briefing Book that argued for the legalization of marijuana and gambling to be among Obama’s top five policy priorities. The result was that the book was quietly shelved while the administration moved on to other experiments.

Nonprofit leaders clearly face a similar quandary, as do corporate leaders concerned about public engagement. On the one hand, inviting public input provides a fantastic opportunity for boosting the legitimacy of your choices in the public eye. What better way to fend off criticism and provide the public with a sense of satisfaction with your actions than to throw open the front door, invite anyone to voice their opinion, and promise to listen? After all, tools like Google Moderator let you do it simple, fast and free — and along with extra legitimacy you might also get some valuable input. Yet the results of Change.gov experiment were not encouraging; the quality of suggestions at Whitehouse2.org is arguably higher, but the stakes are also lower since Obama has not promised to listen. What if you ask “the public” and the suggestions you get are not just different from your own ideas but are simply not thoughtful? Now you’ve ended up in the Obama dilemma: how do you fulfill the public desire for input while still making the right decisions?

Shirky’s answer is effectively that you shouldn’t have made such a promise in the first place: “If you want to know where new interesting useful ideas are going to come from, don’t look at crowds and don’t look at individuals, look at small groups of smart people arguing with each other. Historically that’s been a big source of change.” Peterson more or less agrees, but designs a role for broad public input, proposing that the government should split its efforts to incorporate public input in two directions: (1) open conversations at the local level where the politics are less complex and the issues are more tangible and (2) publicly visible conversations among government-accredited experts that are carefully moderated to prevent small organized groups from hijacking the results. The latter would provide governmental leaders with only the views that they believed they needed, hobbling the chances of including deeply contrarian views, but would be far more likely to produce insight than a conversation that included the general public.

Perhaps a similar approach would be useful for nonprofit leaders.

What if the common practice of consulting with experts were opened up for public view in cases where the conversation was particularly relevant to the public debate?

What if calls for open public critique on were carefully scoped so that the issues being addressed were simple enough that they didn’t take deeply specialized knowledge to discuss?

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