The Wisdom of Crowds in Government 2.0: Information Paradigm Evolution toward Wiki-Government

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.