Abstract:

Crowdsourcing in urban governments is defined as the use of new technologies in order to take advantage of citizen knowledge to find solutions to municipal problems. Driven by the constant technological advances and ubiquitous Internet connection, the crowdsourcing platforms are proving to be valuable tools for triggering and engaging the public towards active participation and the collection of citizen knowledge through crowdsourcing has become commonplace. In this article we present the emerging role of crowdsourcing in public administration and systematically review existing crowdsourcing initiatives deployed in the Czech Republic. We first introduce the overall challenge of information collection in public projects. Then, we identify two crowdsourcing usage types: crowdsourcing for participatory budgeting and crowdsourcing for environmental data collection, and illustrate with examples of case studies from the Czech Republic how crowdsourcing foster citizen engagement. These case studies show that crowdsourcing leads not only to deeper civic engagement, but also to better public decisions.