Citizen-Sourcing for Public Policy Making: Theoretical Foundations, Methods and Evaluation

The public sector, motivated by multiple success stories of the ‘crowd-sourcing’ in the private sector, and also by the increasing complexity of social problems and needs, has started moving in this direction as well, and this gives rise to the gradual development of the ‘citizen-sourcing’. It is important to develop appropriate policy informatics for this purpose, and in particular theoretically sound effective ICT-based citizen-sourcing methods, which enable the efficient retrieval of policy-relevant information, knowledge and ideas from citizens, and then the advanced processing of them in order to calculate useful policy analytics, which can provide substantial support for public policy making. This chapter initially provides an overview of the research that has been conducted in this area by the research group of the author in the last decade, as part of several European projects, concerning the application in the public sector of crowd-sourcing ideas and the development of ICT-based methods for this purpose. We present briefly four such ICT-based methods that we have developed for the ‘active’ as well the ‘passive’ citizen-sourcing, initially aiming at the general public and latter focusing on the experts. Then leveraging the experience gained from the development and some first pilot applications of these methods we propose some theoretical foundations from previous political and management sciences research, which can be used for the future development of effective ICT-based citizen-sourcing methods for supporting public policy making, as well as for their evaluation. Next, based on them an evaluation framework is developed for the multi-perspective evaluation of such methods. Finally, an outline of the evaluations of these ICT-based citizen-sourcing methods is provided, based on parts of this evaluation framework, as well as a comparison of them.