sierra, d (2015) open citizen innovation- an argumentative approach for a city crowdsourcing...

Research Group on Information Systems and Information Communication Technologies in Organizations - GISTIC

Prof. José Ismael Peña

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Open Citizen Innovation: an argumentative approach for a city crowdsourcing platform.

Author: Danny Sierra

Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Industrial Engineering Master

E-mail: [email protected]

1. Abstract

The current study intends to represent scientific arguments that support the research on a

city project for Bogotá, that is, a city crowdsourcing platform. In the article we come across

how a public administration have to set the mission and goals based on legitimacy in order

to work and how technology can be used in the framework of e-government and open

government to meet citizens and government goals by using a crowdsourcing platform for

dual participation and co-creation decision making for the public sector.

Keywords: citizens, citizensourcing, crowdsourcing, open government, e-government,

open innovation, organizational strategy, public sector, public value.

2. Introduction

The Ministry of ICT of Colombia (MinTIC, 2014) filed the act 2573 of 2014 where

established the general directions of the electronic government strategy. In this act

the country accepted the recommendations of the Organization for Economic Co-

operation and Development (OCDE) in carrying out the strategy of a digital

government that states how a public administration should embrace technology in

order to promote more open, participative and innovative approaches allowing

citizens to have access to open data to foster public use. In this document, it also

describes the alliance that Colombia subscribed with Open Government Partnership1

to use technology for citizen participation in public domains, promoting the

innovation and community creation for a transparent, efficient and accountable

government. In this regard, there is a great responsibility for the national government

to make local governments to implement strategies and mechanisms that meet the act

1 OGP: was launched in 2011 to provide an international platform for domestic reformers committed to

making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Since then, OGP has grown from 8 countries to the 65 participating countries indicated on the map below. In all of these countries, government and civil society are working together to develop and implement ambitious open government reforms http://www.opengovpartnership.org/



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depicted above and not only by using the technology but also empowering citizens

and governments to improve the societal interaction through innovation and

participation.

From this starting point, we will go in the article through the organizational strategy

in public sector, describing the elements that have to be aligned. Then, we mention

some definitions on e-government and why the elements in the definitions can

support the strategic missions by using technology. Linked to this, we expand the

description made on open innovation and how this corporate concept might be

extrapolated in the public scene. Once understood open innovation, we shed light on

the business model, crowdsourcing, to have an argument to expand it into the open

government framework where one of its layers corresponds to citizensourcing that

basically is to tap into the crowd to get the best ideas co-created from the collective

intelligence answering an open-problem-solving challenge from the public sector. All

written before intends to give scientific arguments for a city crowdsourcing platform

that is being built at the Engineering Faculty of Universidad Nacional de Colombia

through Vivelab Bogotá for the Mayor of Bogotá.

3. Creating public value: organizational strategy for public sectors.

It is considered a public organization a sort of monopoly; this means that competitors are

out of place in this regard. Therefore, a government administration’s efforts are oriented to

satisfy the demands of citizens by offering a portfolio of products based on financial terms;

however, it is not quite clear in terms of which elements of legitimacy those are based on.

Thus, a public organization has to define the mission and its goals for the public sector on

certain objectives. Kennedy School of Government stated in its research studies an

organizational strategy for public sector. They suggest that have to be three elements

simultaneously aligned in order to connect the citizens, stakeholders and clients’ aspirations

to fit the public value (Moore, 1997).

This concept of organization strategy for the public sector stated by Moore goes as follows:

1- “declare the overall mission or purpose of an organization (in terms of public

value);

2- offer an account of sources of support and legitimacy that will be tapped to sustain

society commitment to the enterprise;

3- and explain how the enterprises will have to be organized and operated to achieve

the declared objectives”.



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The strategy in order to be developed has to meet three broad tests described by him as

well:

1- “The strategy has to be substantively valuable in this sense; the organization

produces things to value to overseers, clients and beneficiaries at low cost in terms

of money and authority.

2- It has to be legitimate and political sustainable. That is, the enterprise must be able

to continually attract both authority and money from political authorizing

environment to which is ultimately accountable.

3- It must be operationally and administrable feasible in that the authorized, valuable

activities can actually be accomplished by the existing organization with help from

others who can be induced to contribute to the organizational goal”.

According to Moore, these three elements have to be linked and work out to each other to

have a successful outcome. Just imagine if one of mentioned above lacks, the whole

strategy fails. If citizens do not feel benefited by the things produced by the organization,

then, is not valuable for them, hence, it fails. And if the political environment cannot

support them in terms of legitimacy, it fails. And if operationally the strategy does not meet

the goals helped by other organizations, then fails as well.

All of this bases its importance on the management of external demands and internals

capabilities to make things work as stated in mission and goals of a public administration.

If citizens are capturing the value of what the organization in producing the public manages

may feel happy. However, almost never is the case, because there is always a constant

alignment of strategic elements to fulfill the desires, supplies and execution among parties

to orchestrate efficiently.

This analysis draws attentions on how a public administration enables mechanisms in order

to empower citizens and bring a broader dynamics on the democratic field by using

technology in order to manage it better. For this reason, we shed light on the literature of e-

government to know how this can help to enhance the productivity of a government by

using technology. Since the large use of the internet and widespread use of personal

computers and mobile phones, governments are in the search of new and effective ways to

improve public administration taking as examples from other fields.

4. Definition on E-Government

There is not a universal accepted concept about e-government; nonetheless, several authors

agree that have to cover information and communication technologies from the government

to deliver services to citizens.



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We are going to mentions some of the authors in the last years that have come across

defining e-government found in (Yildiz, 2007):

4.1. E-government is defined as “utilizing the Internet and the World-Wide-Web for

delivering government information and services to citizens” (United Nations, &

American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), 2002, p. 1)

4.2. “Define e-government as the relationships between governments, their customers

(businesses, other governments, and citizens), and their suppliers (again,

businesses, other governments, and citizens) by the use of electronic means”.

(Means & Schneider, 2002, p. 121)

4.3. “E-government is…Simply using information technology to deliver government

services directly to the customer 24/7. The customer can be a citizen, a business or

even another government entity”. (Duffy, 2001)

4.4. “Define e-government as the use of technology, especially Web-based applications

to enhance access to and efficiently deliver government information and services.

They categorize e-government efforts into three broad categories of Government-

Government (G2G), Government-to-Citizen (G2C), and Government-to-Business

(G2B). One may include two additional categories in this list: Government-to-Civil

Societal. Organizations (G2CS) and Citizen-to-Citizen (C2C), if the interaction

among citizens is related to the other three categories of e-government”. (Brown &

Brudney, J, L., 2001)

4.5. In Colombia, Ministry of ICT defines it as following: “contribute through the use

of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), to build a State more

efficient, more transparent, more participatory to provide better services to citizens

and enterprises, resulting in a more competitive production sector, a modern public

administration and more informed and better tools for community participation”.

(Riasco & Giordano, 2008)

The definitions above, let us understand the main elements of what an e-government means

and why is strategic for a public administration to fulfill a democratic desire among parties

(e.g: citizens, local and international entities and businesses). As we read the definitions,

we can deduce that e-government implies interaction on both ways enabled by technologies

in different sectors to improve economical, socially and political matters. In this sense,

participation and information management play an important role to meet the e-

government’s goals as a managerial strategic for the public sector.

Von Hippel, (2005) has been researching on the field of lead user or also known as user

innovation. This concept basically means that users are the main source of innovation due

to the fact that in order to improve a self-experience with a product or service the users

changes it, adapts it, prototypes it and so to satisfy his own needs. The discussion of this



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topic has also drawn attention in the public sphere where external actors can be engaged

with the government in order to create a participatory connection with citizens to have a

public value-creation and a refined decision-making process legitimized in a democratic

innovation scenario.

Thus, in an e-government strategy, to open the boundaries of the public organization and

take into account how the users of the public domain (citizens) can enhance the public or

State services by letting participating in the construction of their own country or city,

knowing that the main source of knowledge and innovation come from citizens, that is

argument to outsource the decision making process utilizing technology.

5. Definition on Open Innovation

Chesbrough (2003) coined the term open innovation as follows:

“Open innovation is the intentional use of inflows and outflows of

knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets with

the external use of innovation, respectively use. [This paradigm]

assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as

internal, internal and external paths to market, while advancing in

their technology”.

This definition comes from the efforts of firms to exploit their knowledge within the

organization, through processes of research & development (R & D). Currently they have

ceased to become more competitive, because they have lost the opportunity to draw

experience and knowledge from external sources. (Laursen & Salter, 2006). This is also

stressed by Cohen & Levinthal (1990) which states that the ability to exploit external

knowledge is a vital component of innovation capabilities. That is, that the joint external

knowledge, recognizes the value of it, assimilate and implement the business model of the

organization, there is what these authors call "absorption capacity" seal for the paradigm of

open innovation.

Open innovation comes into discussion due to the fact of a closed innovation logic (see

Figure 1), where firms were engaged to generate their own innovations through processes

of ideation, development, construction products and services, marketing, distribution,

finance and support these processes without interacting with externals (Huizingh, 2010)



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Figure 1: closed innovation model versus open innovation model. Chesbrough (2003, 2006)

Open innovation is distinguished by its two operating patterns (inside-out and outside-in).

The first is the way the organization manages some of the ideas and outsiders generating

new technologies, markets and business models that do not have direct value to the

organization, but that they can trade with other players. On the other hand, the second is

outside-in, where other players can participate in the innovation process and can be part of

a different organization, including technology, co-development, patents, etc., thus speeding

up the process innovation (Enkel, Gassmann, & Chesbrough, 2009)

6. Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in the magazine called Wired

(Howe, 2006) describing a business model based on internet that taps into the crowd to get

creative ideas from a distributed network of individuals by an open call to benefit a single

firm. (Seltzer & Mahmoudi, 2013; Brabham, 2008) describe it as a strategic model that

accelerate efficiently for companies to produce new products and solve problems using

internet to interact with people independently where they are in a new way (Agrawal,

Catalini, & Goldfarb, 2011). The concept is based on the egalitarian principle denoted by

(Seltzer & Mahmoudi, 2013) that is, “every individual possess some knowledge or talent

that some other individual will find valuable.” In other words, every person has the same

opportunity to propose ideas beside his or her background and the crowdsourcing model

enable these ideas to connect with other people that aim to a common purpose.

In the book, the wisdom of crowds Surowiecki, (2005) states the following ‘‘. . . under the

right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the

smartest people in them’’ (p. xiii)." This means that averaging is not the solution but adding



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the best of it. (Lévy & Bonomo, 1999) had previously spoken of collective intelligence

where they question:

“It has become impossible to restrict knowledge and its movement to

castes of specialists . . . Our living knowledge, skills, and abilities are

in the process of being recognized as the primary source of all other

wealth. What then will our new communication tools be used for? The

most socially useful goal will no doubt be to supply ourselves with the

instruments for sharing our mental abilities in the construction of

collective intellect of imagination. (p. 9) cited by (Brabham, 2008)

From this, we can deduce that Lévy and Bonomo rely on the community as a source of

knowledge and its potential. An important aspect of crowdsourcing is that in a problem-

solving situation, a firm can benefit by having a large number of individuals from different

cognitively perspectives offering their ideas, even if those individuals are not deemed

specialists themselves (Brabham, 2010). Additionally, these authors point out that

crowdsourcing should be assumed for summing up rather than averaging solutions. That is,

creating value in terms of new and fresh ideas co-created rather than getting to a consensus

about an idea. Turning back to the first definition made in this topic Howe stated in 2006

the following:

Crowdsourcing’s Howe definition:

“Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or

institution taking a function once performed by employees and

outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people

in the form of an open call . . . The crucial prerequisite is the use of

the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.”

taken from (Brabham, 2009)

7. Open Government

According to the literature, the concept Open Government or at least the term in not

something new. The first time mentioned was in the British political arena in late 70’s,

where government matters and initiatives of the government should be widely discussed

and citizens can assess and screen in order to mitigate opacity. (Alujas Ramírez, 2011;

Chapman & Hunt, 1987). And there was always the intention that citizens get involved

with the discussions and the decisions of the government; however, the demanding became

more to information access for accountability. (Alujas Ramírez, 2011)



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In the United Stated filed an Act in 1966 called FOIA that stands for (Freedom Of

Information Act) where the government give free access of State information following the

privilege that have citizens of the “right to know”. This has provoked replication in

countries worldwide.

However, the signification of the open government have risen importance also in a different

shift related to communication patterns, global social network, and ICT, where the

penetration has rapidly increased in the last thirty years with internet, so different use not

only in business but in government have drawn attention. The social media and the Web 2.0

paradigm have contributed to use the term Government 2.0 based on collaboration,

openness, and transparency. This has caused that the citizens can interact closely with the

government and participate in order to have a social control that not only be accepted in a

closed and hermetic public administration.

The most accepted definition of open government goes as follows:

“Open government is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens

have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the

government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest

construction it opposes reason of state and other considerations,

which have tended to legitimize extensive state secrecy. The origins of

open government arguments can be dated to the time of the European

Enlightenment: to debates about the proper construction of a then

nascent democratic society. Among recent developments is the theory

of open source governance, which advocates the application of the

free software movement to democratic principles, enabling interested

citizens to get more directly involved in the legislative process”.

(Wikipedia, 2013)

So the logic of the open government system is based on interaction and flows of

information among entities, governments and citizens. We can see how the three main

actors: government, intermediary bodies, and citizens, business, civil society organization

interact each other by demanding and responding in a transactional form. (See Figure 2)



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Figure 2: Information flow in a ideal Open Government System, (Gavelin, Burall, &

Wilson, 2009)

Now linking the principles of crowdsourcing and open innovation in the public arena, there

is a framework created by Hilgers & Ihl, (2010) that state and describe the procedures and

dimensions to satisfy the open government scheme and consequently the organizational

public strategy (see Figure 3).

7.1. Citizen Ideation and Innovation: this first layer aims to gather knowledge and

ideas through creativity from citizenry to solve a common good by idea- and

innovation-contests through open innovation platforms.

7.2. Collaborative Administration: the second layer aims to integrate citizen and

firms’ experiences with public administrative processes based on user innovation

and user-generated-content.

7.3. Collaborative Democracy: the third layer sums up new ways of collaboration in

terms of public participation in decision and policy making, building institutional

trust among entities.



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Figure 3: Framework for citizen engaged governance (Hilgers & Ihl, 2010)

8. Research context

The main motivation of the research based on a project (crowdsourcing platform) that is

being carried out by the working agreement between the Engineering Faculty of

Universidad Nacional de Colombia - UN, Ministerio de las Tecnologías de la Información

y las Comunicaciones – MinTIC and Alta Consejería Distrital de TIC – ACDTIC of the

Mayor of Bogotá, through the project Vivelab Bogotá. This last one, is an innovation

laboratory for the city where have been developing technology and training projects for the

city, sponsored by ACDTIC. One of the projects is a web based crowdsourcing platform in

order to post public sector challenges (e.g mobility, health, security among others) so that

citizens can submit ideas for solutions. This platform will be launched in the mid July of

2015 in Bogotá and the main input for this innovation strategy behind is to succeed with the

citizens’ participation with ideas and the social mechanisms in it to select the best ideas for

the sector authority to implement in the city.

9. Current research status

This is the timetable established for the research in this project; the green line indicates the

status of progress of the project so far. (see Table 1)



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Activities Semester 1 Semester 2 Semester 3 Semester 4

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Refining State of the

art X X X X X X X X X X X

Defining the

technology

architecture

X X X X X

Developing the

citizensourcing

platform Bogotá

Abierta

X X X X X X X

Definition

methodology X X X X X

Metrics & Measures

deployment X X X

Results of results

X X

Final document

X

Table 1: own creation.

10. Conclusions

The literature reviewed in the concepts from the strategic point of view in the public sector

and other topics such e-government and open government let us envision the importance to

drive a governmental policy to its maximum potential involving citizens in the building of

better and suitable decisions. Moreover, citizens find mechanisms for city innovation based

on their own user-center perspective and validating the user innovation concepts that

depicts that the source of innovation comes from users, in this case, citizens. So using

technology and crowdsourcing platforms answer the arguments described in the act filed by

the Ministry of ICT and gives institutional relevance to the project. In terms of benefits, this

is a win-win situation for governments, businesses and citizens because establish certain

purposes that the act aims at. For example, transparency, openness, collaboration and in

other words new ways of democracy enabled by technology and empowered by people.



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11. References

Agrawal, Catalini, & Goldfarb. (2011). The geography of crowdfunding.

Alujas Ramírez. (2011). Gobierno Abierto y Modernización de la Gestión Pública.

Tendencias actuales y el (Inevitable) Camino que Viene-Reflexiones Seminales

(Open Government and Modernization of Public Management: Current Trends and

the (Inevitable) Way Forward-Seminal Reflections). Revista Enfoques: Ciencia

Política y Administración Pública, 9(15), 99-125.

Brabham, D. C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving an introduction and

cases. Convergence: the international journal of research into new media

technologies, 14(1), 75-90.

Brabham, D. C. (2009). Crowdsourcing Public Participation.

Brabham, D. C. (2010). Moving the crowd at Threadless: Motivations for participation in a

crowdsourcing application. Information, Communication & Society, 13(8), 1122-

1145. http://doi.org/10.1080/13691181003624090

Brown, M. M., & Brudney, J, L. (2001). Achieving advanced electronic government

services: An examination of obstacles and implications from an international

perspective. Paper presented at the National Public Management Research

Conference, Bloomington, IN.

Chapman, R., & Hunt, M. (1987). Open Government. A study of the prospects of open

government within the limitations of the British political system, Routledge,

London.



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Chesbrough. (2003). Open innovation -The new imperative for creating and profiting from

technology.

Cohen, & Levinthal. (1990). Absorptive Capacity: a new perspective on learning and

innovatión. Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue I: Tecnology,

Organization and Innovation, 35, 128, 152.

Duffy, D. (2001). Q&A: Balancing the role of e-Government: Interview with Mike Hernon,

vice president of egovernment for New York City-based GovWorks.

Enkel, E., Gassmann, O., & Chesbrough, H. (2009). Open R&D and open innovation:

exploring the phenomenon.

Gavelin, K., Burall, S., & Wilson, R. (2009). Open Government: beyond static measures A

paper produced by Involve for the OECD.

Hilgers, D., & Ihl, C. (2010). Citizensourcing: Applying the concept of open innovation to

the public sector. The International Journal of Public Participation, 4(1), 67-88.

Howe, J. (2006). The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired, 14(6). Retrieved from

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.htm

Huizingh, E. . (2010). Open innovation: State of the art and future perspectives.

Laursen, K., & Salter, A. (2006). Open for Innovation: The role of openess in explaining

innovation performance among UK manufacturing firms.

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cyberspace. Perseus Publishing.

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design of 21st century companies and markets. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

MinTIC. (2014). Decreto Gobierno en línea.



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Moore, M., H. (1997). Creating public value.

Riasco, S. ., & Giordano, G. . (2008). Riascos, S. C., Giordano, G. M., & Solano, O. J. El

Gobierno Electrónico como estrategia de participación ciudadana en la

Administración pública a nivel de Suramérica-Casos Colombia y Uruguay.

Seltzer, & Mahmoudi. (2013). Citizen Participation, Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing.

Surowiecki. (2005). The wisdom of crowds.

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Benchmarking e-government: A global perspective. New York, NY: U.N.

Publications.

Von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing innovation. MIT press.

Wikipedia. (2013). “Open Government.” Wikipedia.org. Last Modified on July 11, 2013.

Yildiz, M. (2007). E-government research: Reviewing the literature, limitations, and ways

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