Abstract
This essay, exploring the peer-to-peer collaborative atmosphere penetrating Wikivism, crowd-sourcing and open-source movement, identifies a new paradigm of public information as evolution toward Wiki-government. Citizen participants can collectively create public information via various platforms enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. Under the new participatory paradigm that a large number of individual citizens and government cocreate public information, not only do Wiki-oriented government agencies benefit from crowd wisdom, but citizens also learn from their colleague citizens. Crowd-sourcing to collect the wisdom of crowds is categorized into four types by matching between the quantity and the quality of participation: civic-sourcing, mob-sourcing, professionalism, and fiasco. For Wiki-government, a mass of well-informed and concerned participants in civic-sourcing make more desirable outcomes for a society than fewer, poorly-informed and unconcerned people. Thus, civic-sourcing promises greater advantages for government over professionalism and mob-sourcing. Three strategies for civic-sourcing (Wiki/open-sourcing, contest, or social networking) can be employed through different working mechanisms, with different motivators for participation, and under different approaches to human nature of key participants.
Recommended Citation
Nam, Taewoo, "The Wisdom of Crowds in Government 2.0: Information Paradigm Evolution toward Wiki-Government" (2010). AMCIS 2010 Proceedings. 337.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2010/337