Talks:
Tanja Aitamurto
Crowdsourcing in Policymaking: Motivations, Value, and Challenges
Abstract
Crowdsourcing in policymaking has become a more common method used by governments and non-profits across the world. Crowdsourcing is a democratic innovation enabling a large-scale civic participation in policymaking. Iceland deployed crowdsourcing in its constitution-reform process, Finland has crowdsourced several laws, and in the United States federal agencies and local government have applied crowdsourcing in strategy and urban planning reforms. However, it remains unclear what the value of crowdsourcing in policymaking is, what motivates the crowd and what the challenges of the innovation is. In this talk, I will address these questions based on both empirical and theoretical work on crowdsourcing in policymaking in several countries.
About the lecturer
Tanja Aitamurto, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at the School of Engineering at Stanford. She examines the impact of civic technologies on human behavior and society. The empirical contexts range from large-scale online collaboration systems, such as applications of collective intelligence in deliberation and policy-making, in open and participatory journalism, civic crowdfunding, to civic applications of artificial intelligence to virtual, mixed, and augmented reality.
Tanja’s work has received a number of awards, and it has been published in several academic venues, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, International Journal of Communication, CHI and ECSCW.
Tanja has given talks about her research at the White House, the Wikimedia Foundation, OECD, the Council of Europe and in several parliaments and governments, including those of Canada, Austria and Finland.