Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: leveraging the collective intelligence of online communities for public good

As an application of deliberative democratic theory in practice, traditional public participation programs in urban planning seek to cultivate citizen input and produce public decisions agreeable to all stakeholders. However, the deliberative democratic ideals of these traditional public participation programs, consisting of town hall meetings, hearings, workshops, and design charrettes, are often stymied by interpersonal dynamics, special interest groups, and an absence of key stakeholder demographics due to logistical issues of meetings or lack of interest and awareness. This dissertation project proposes crowdsourcing as an online public participation alternative that may ameliorate some of the hindrances of traditional public participation methods.

CROWDSOURCING AS A MODEL FOR PROBLEM SOLVING: LEVERAGING THE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES FOR PUBLIC GOOD by Daren Carroll Brabham A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah December 2010 Copyright © Daren Carroll Brabham 2010 All Rights Reserved Th e Uni v e r s i t y o f Ut a h Gr a dua t e S cho o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Daren Carroll Brabham has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Joy Pierce , Chair May 6, 2010 Date Approved Karim R. Lakhani , Member May 6, 2010 Date Approved Timothy Larson , Member May 6, 2010 Date Approved Thomas W. Sanchez , Member May 6, 2010 Date Approved Cassandra Van Buren , Member May 6, 2010 Date Approved and by Ann L. Darling , Chair of the Department of Communication and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT As an application of deliberative democratic theory in practice, traditional public participation programs in urban planning seek to cultivate citizen input and produce public decisions agreeable to all stakeholders. However, the deliberative democratic ideals of these traditional public participation programs, consisting of town hall meetings, hearings, workshops, and design charrettes, are often stymied by interpersonal dynamics, special interest groups, and an absence of key stakeholder demographics due to logistical issues of meetings or lack of interest and awareness. This dissertation project proposes crowdsourcing as an online public participation alternative that may ameliorate some of the hindrances of traditional public participation methods. Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model largely in use for business. It leverages the collective intelligence of online communities by soliciting ideas and solutions for an organization from these communities through the form of an open call. The mechanism of one type of crowdsourcing, the peer-vetted creative production approach, aligns with the goals of public participation programs. In light of this, Next Stop Design was launched in 2009 in an attempt to test crowdsourcing in a public participation context for transit planning. Next Stop Design was an online competition where users submitted bus stop shelter designs and voted on the designs of peers to determine a best design. This study examines the effectiveness of the Next Stop Design project as an online deliberative democratic process, as perceived by Next Stop Design participants, iv and also examines the motivations of participants on the site. Interviews via instant messenger were conducted with 23 participants focusing on their perceptions of the Next Stop Design project according to a list of ideal features for online deliberative democratic process and a list of motivations for participation. Data suggest that Next Stop Design was perceived to be a generally effective online deliberative democratic process, with perceived weaknesses concerning the facilitation of the project through public voting and the equality of participants on the site in light of apparent voting fraud in the competition. Findings also suggest that participants were motivated to participate in the project because they saw an opportunity to advance their careers, they had fun, they learned new skills and knowledge, and they saw the project as an opportunity for creative self-expression. Participants were also motivated to participate because the Web site was appealing, usable, and had a low barrier to entry, and participants offered constructive feedback to improve the process as a whole. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ vii Chapters 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 PEN: A Vignette for Online Public Participation ....................................................2 Crowdsourcing as an Online Public Participation Tool ...........................................4 Overview of the Dissertation ...................................................................................5 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ......................................................................................10 Deliberative Democracy ........................................................................................11 Public Participation in Urban Planning..................................................................15 The Medium of the Internet ...................................................................................21 Collective Intelligence, Wise Crowds, and Problem Solving ................................24 Online Deliberation ................................................................................................27 Democratic Process in Organized Networks .........................................................33 Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving ...................................................35 The Knowledge Discovery and Management Approach ...........................37 The Broadcast Search Approach ................................................................38 The Peer-Vetted Creative Production Approach .......................................40 Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking ...................................................41 Moving the Crowd .................................................................................................43 3. METHOD ..............................................................................................................55 Applied Communication Research and Critical Media Design .............................56 Next Stop Design as Research Site ........................................................................59 Basic Findings from Next Stop Design .....................................................63 The Design of this Study........................................................................................67 4. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION..........................................................................77 Summary of Interview Data Collected ..................................................................78 Themes Relating to Ideal Features of Online Deliberative Democratic Process ...................................................................................................................82 vi Accessible and Informed............................................................................83 Autonomous, Free of Censorship, and Transparent...................................86 Pluralistic and Inclusive .............................................................................89 Accountable and Relevant and Public .......................................................92 Facilitated and Equal and Responsive .......................................................96 Themes Relating to Motivations ..........................................................................101 To Advance One's Career and To be Recognized by Peers ....................102 To Contribute to a Collaborative Effort and To Express Oneself ...........105 To Have Fun and To Learn New Skills and Knowledge .........................106 Low Barriers to Entry, Ease of Use, and Perceptions of an Appealing, Usable Web Site ....................................................................108 General Impressions and Crowdsourcing for Future Government Projects ........110 5. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................116 Summary of Findings from this Study .................................................................117 Findings Related to the Ideal Features of Online Deliberative Democracy ...............................................................................................118 Findings Related to Motivations ..............................................................120 Limitations and Future Needed Research ............................................................121 Guiding Principles for Practitioners Interested in Crowdsourcing for Public Participation ..............................................................................................127 APPENDIX: INTERVIEW GUIDE ................................................................................132 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................135 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The crowd that had a hand in this dissertation and in my decade of higher education deserves a lot of praise. I am thankful for my advisor, Joy Pierce, both for dealing with my procrastination and stubbornness and for providing wonderful scholarly guidance and friendly encouragement along the way. Thanks also to my supervisory committee: Cassandra Van Buren, for cultivating my creativity and inspiring me to push boundaries; Tom Sanchez, for supporting my interdisciplinary explorations into urban planning and helping get Next Stop Design off the ground; Tim Larson, for years of encouragement and confidence in both my teaching and research abilities; and Karim Lakhani, for going out on a limb to take me on as an advisee cross-country and demanding rigorous scholarship from me. I am also grateful to Ron Yaros, Hector Postigo, Glen Feighery, Marouf Hasian, Suzanne Horsley, David Vergobbi, and Ted Knowlton, who each at some point advised the many research projects and papers on crowdsourcing I attempted on the way to writing this dissertation. I owe a huge debt to my colleagues at Burton Group, especially to Jason Lewis and David Broschinsky, who taught me so much about the new media industry and were so supportive and so patient with me working part-time to pursue my degree. David Broschinsky taught me everything I know about Web usability and design. He is a valuable mentor and friend. I was also fortunate over the years to connect with the discipline of urban planning. My friend and colleague Leah Jaramillo is to thank for introducing me to the viii International Association for Public Participation and ultimately the professional networks I now enjoy in planning, and she also landed me my first speaking gig on crowdsourcing. Thank you Leah. I am also thankful to the Federal Transit Administration for funding the Next Stop Design project and to the folks at the Utah Transit Authority for their cooperation, as well as to Keith Bartholomew, Mike Davie, Jim Agutter, and Ryan Smith for their work on the project. I have interacted with quite a network of experts on social media and crowdsourcing, and these individuals have profoundly shaped my thinking on the topic. Thank you to Jeff Howe, Noah Friedland, Henry Jenkins, Karthika Muthukumaraswamy, Sarah Otner, Katri Lietsala, Beth Noveck, Lars Bo Jeppesen, and many others who asked me tough questions and provided their insights about crowdsourcing. Finally, I have enjoyed wonderful support from friends and family during my graduate study. Thank you to Miriam Brabham, Dean Brabham, Robyn Heyrend, Eric Eliason, Burke Maxfield, Jackie Grobstein, Taylor Maxfield, Ridley Heyrend, and all of my friends for making my life easier and happier these past few years. Most of all, though, I owe this dissertation to Annie Maxfield. She gave me the idea to write about crowdsourcing in the first place-yes, she did-and she has been both my biggest fan and my toughest, most productive critic. She is my best friend, soul mate, spouse, co-author, and puzzle piece, and I wouldn't be doing this without her. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In this dissertation, I examine the emergence of an online business model called crowdsourcing and situate it in the context of public participation, deliberative democracy, and problem solving. I argue that crowdsourcing is an effective tool for online deliberative democratic processes, a tool that can be used to leverage the collective intelligence of online communities in the service of the public good. To do this, I investigate the Next Stop Design case, a crowdsourcing project designed to test the model in a public participation context for transit planning, specifically in bus stop shelter design. Through online interviews with Next Stop Design participants, I explore the perceptions of the project as an effective online deliberative democratic process and discover what motivated users to participate in the project. Emergent themes from the interviews suggest that Next Stop Design was mostly a success in aligning with the ideals of online deliberative democracy (Noveck, 2003), with some concerns about accountability, equality, and the facilitation mechanism in the project. Themes also suggest that participants were motivated for a variety of reasons, broadly concerning career advancement and enjoyment. I begin this dissertation project with a vignette about an early online participation experiment, as it provides an interesting historical perspective and a conceptual frame for the remainder of this study. 2 PEN: A Vignette for Online Public Participation The city of Santa Monica launched the Public Electronic Network (PEN) in early 1989. PEN was the first online network operated by a city government for use by the public, and very quickly the online community at PEN grew to several hundred, and eventually, a few thousand members. PEN was comprised of three components: a database of public notices, hearings, and schedules; a hub for citizens and city officials to exchange e-mails; and a discussion board for citizens to engage in debates about all kinds of issues facing the city. City officials were surprised to see that it was this last component, the public discussion space, that thrived the most, as citizens actively discussed issues of urban planning, development, homelessness, and city services in a kind of ongoing virtual town hall meeting. About "20 to 25 per cent [sic] of PEN usage" came from the use of "public terminals," such as in libraries, enabling "the voices of the otherwise disenfranchised-including the homeless-[to be] heard by the community" (McKeown, 1991, para. 6). Donald Paschal was a homeless Santa Monican who used PEN to help organize the establishment of a shower, washer, and locker facility for the city's homeless in the early 1990s. Paschal reflected that the most remarkable thing about the PEN community is that a City Council member and a pauper can coexist, albeit not always in perfect harmony, but on an equal basis. . . . I do not believe that I could have [helped establish the shower, washer, and locker facility] without participation in PEN. If this experience means anything, it is that throughout my battles, I was considered human. To me that is important. On the streets, one is looked on with varying measures of pity, disgust, hatred, and compassion, but almost always as something alien, from another world. But on PEN, I have been helped, rebuffed, scorned, criticized, considered, and in most cases, respected-as a human. PEN is a great equalizer. Eventually. There are no homeless or homed unless we say we are. We are not one happy family; like most families, we squabble. On any topic, no one can accuse PENners of 3 agreeing fully. But we are communicating, and that is a start. (Schmitz, Rogers, Phillips, & Paschal, 1995, pp. 38-39) Ultimately, PEN was credited with forging connections between Santa Monica's citizens-homeless and otherwise-and its elected officials that eventually resulted in the establishment of additional facilities and services for the homeless, the blocking of a key waterfront hotel development in town, and other substantial public decisions (Schmitz et al., 1995). PEN was soon heralded as a model for future deliberative democratic processes online, a discourse emerging that dreamed of utopian democratic possibilities through computer networks where everyday citizens would be empowered to stake a claim in the administration of government (Flichy, 2001/2007; Van Tassel, 1994). On the other hand, PEN, like many other municipal systems that emerged shortly thereafter, had its own troubles. PEN's designer, Ken Phillips, noted that the goal of PEN was "not to decrease bureaucracy but to increase communication," and many Santa Monica city officials "grumble[d] that they spen[t] too much of their time answering PEN messages from electronically loquacious citizens" ("The PEN is Mighty," 1992, p. 96). While PEN seemed to bring more voices, more diverse voices, and perhaps qualitatively more robust citizen input to bear on local issues, then, it may not have actually been more administratively efficient. In addition to the volume of messages requiring staff attention, Santa Monica Councilmember Kevin McKeown (1991) believed the real "dark side" of PEN was the persistence of "flaming" (personal attacks in online communities by anonymous users) and sexual harassment and degradation of women in the network by anonymous (male) users (para. 15-22). Indeed, some politicians in Santa Monica eventually stopped participating in PEN altogether, "citing the rudeness of many of their 4 correspondents" ("The PEN is Mighty," 1992, p. 96). PEN's discussion capabilities were restructured in 1993 to limit the frequent and lengthy unmoderated posts by some flamers in the community, a controversial decision that some PENners claimed restricted free speech (Schmitz et al., 1995, pp. 40-41). PEN is a useful starting point for a discussion of deliberative democracy, e-governance, and public participation online. PEN seemed a robust cocktail of all that is good and potentially bad about taking public decision-making online. From censorship and flaming to empowering the marginalized and connecting everyday citizens to the process of governance, PEN opens many conversations about the effectiveness of deliberation, the design of online discussion spaces, and the pace of public input in a digital era. Ultimately, I believe in the potential for online democratic processes, the power of collective intelligence aggregated through the medium of the Internet, and the possibility that, when carefully designed and managed, the Internet can be used to leverage the collective intelligence of online communities for the public good. Specifically, my ultimate claim is that crowdsourcing, an online distributed problem solving and production model, is one such method for conducting effective online public participation programs to solve problems in the domain of urban planning, and that crowdsourcing should be embraced by governments to improve their public participation processes. Crowdsourcing as an Online Public Participation Tool Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model. It has largely been used by businesses since about 2000 with much success. It works by challenging an online community, through an open call, to propose solutions and designs 5 to an organization's problem. The online community then generates solutions and, in some cases, also vets the solutions of peers in order to produce a single best idea for the organization. With a team of researchers, I embarked on an effort to translate this model for a different kind of problem solving environment. I sought to use the logic of crowdsourcing to replicate a public participation process online. Like PEN, this project was designed to engage the public with one aspect of the business of governance, public participation for public decisions. The project we developed, Next Stop Design, asked an online community to submit bus stop shelter designs and vote on the designs of peers in the summer and fall of 2009. The project generated a lot of participation, but to assess the effectiveness of the project as an online deliberative democratic tool, I interviewed a sample of participants for their perceptions of the project and why they chose to participate. My study was driven by two broad research questions: 1. Did participants in the Next Stop Design project perceive crowdsourcing as an effective form of online participation? 2. Why did individuals participate in the Next Stop Design project? Overview of the Dissertation This dissertation project unfolds as a typical qualitative study. In Chapter 2, I present the conceptual framework for the project. I connect deliberative democratic theory and empirical research from public participation programs to make a general claim about the fundamental alignment between public participation in urban planning contexts and the goals of deliberation. In both deliberation and public participation in urban planning, a group decision is sought through ideation and dialogue that ideally satisfies 6 all stakeholders affected by the decision. Then, I present a discussion of the features of new media technologies, specifically the Internet, and how these features enable a form of collective intelligence and crowd wisdom to emerge in participatory online spaces. The temporal flexibility, reach, anonymity, and converged technological platform of the Internet make possible the aggregation of millions of minds across the globe and channel that creative intellect for specific purposes. It is an articulation of these many technological forces now that enables this kind of productive coordination. Following an examination of the literature on online deliberation, I assert that crowdsourcing may be an appropriate fit for online deliberative projects, as a new way of conducting public participation programs with new media. I explain the four general types of crowdsourcing and emphasize the peer-vetted creative production type as embodying the ideals of public participation. This crowdsourcing type charges users with both generating ideas in response to a challenge and sorting through the ideas of peers to select the idea the market will support. Beth Simone Noveck's (2003) 11 ideal features for online deliberative democratic processes provide a functional heuristic for assessing the effectiveness of Next Stop Design as an online deliberative project, and I enumerate those features in some depth. The second half of Chapter 2 focuses on uses and gratifications theory and the literature on motivations of individuals online. In many decades of theory and empirical research on motivations, many contributions to the literature have focused on descriptive typologies and the continued distillation and fragmentation of motivational categories. In the scope of uses and gratifications in the online environment, a general consensus emerges concerning motivational categories. I put forth nine broad 7 motivational categories for online participation that I use in my interviews with Next Stop Design participants. Chapter 3 details my methodological approach to this study. I situate this study in the landscape of applied communication research in the critical tradition. I discuss the creation of the Next Stop Design project as a site for study as a part of a critical media design approach to research. I believe that critical media design encapsulates the articulation of applied communication research, critical inquiry, and the rapid advances in new media technology. Critical media design is an approach to research that is focused on applied research studies undertaken with an eye toward critical theory through the original construction of digital media goods. These goods become research sites in an ongoing, iterative process of creation and critique. Next Stop Design was created with this research approach in mind. Next, I describe the Next Stop Design research site in some depth, providing basic use data of the site and basic outcomes from the competition itself. Next Stop Design was a Web site focused on a bus stop shelter design competition. Design submission was free, and users on the site submitted and voted on designs. The competition ran for 4 months in 2009, drew thousands of visits to the site, registered nearly 3,200 users, and hosted 260 bus stop designs, ultimately producing a set of international winners through peer voting. Finally, I discuss the issues surrounding online interviewing with instant messenger and how this study was designed. Participants from Next Stop Design were interviewed through instant messenger programs about their perceptions of the project as an effective online deliberative democratic process, as well as about their motivations for participation. 8 Chapter 4 presents analysis and discussion of the data generated from the interviews with participants, with several transcript excerpts. The 23 participants interviewed for this study largely found Next Stop Design to align with Noveck's (2003) ideal features for online deliberative democratic process, with some exceptions. Concerns about the effectiveness of the project in terms of deliberative democracy related to anonymity on the site, equality between participants, and the facilitation mechanism used in the competition. Most notably, cheating occurred in the competition, which compromised participants' confidence in the site's ability to maintain an equal, fair process through online public voting. Motivations data indicated that participants were driven to participate on the site because it was a fun experience, it offered a chance to advance their careers, they learned new skills through participation, and it was an opportunity to express themselves creatively. Perhaps the most valuable findings in the study were that participants were significantly motivated to participate based on the appealing design and usability of the site, and that participants offered helpful feedback for how to improve the process as a whole alongside their criticisms. In other words, participants seemed eager to engage in the refinement of the very new media tool investigated in this study. Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation project with a summary of findings from the study. Also included is an examination of the limitations of the study and suggestions for future research in this vein. One limitation included language barriers for international participants, especially given an English-only, American-focused competition site and interviews only offered in English. The competition drew a large percentage of visitors, registered users, and designs from outside the U.S. and even beyond other primarily 9 English-speaking countries. Finally, I close with a list of guiding principles for practitioners intent on using crowdsourcing for participation in their organizations, a handy statement of tips and advice for those most likely to be concerned with implementing crowdsourcing in the future. It is important that a study that is part of a critical media design research approach be made accessible and useful to nonscholars. I offer these concluding points as a beginning to a toolkit for practitioners and governments eager to crowdsource. CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW In this chapter, I present the conceptual framework underpinning the research questions presented in Chapter 1. First, I examine the fundamental theories driving deliberative democracy, followed by a section detailing public participation in urban planning. Taken together, it would seem that participation programs in the domain of urban planning are predicated on the notion of deliberation. Next, I present several features of new media technologies, such as the Internet, that come to bear on the potential for deliberation online. Then, a discussion of collective intelligence, crowd wisdom, and problem solving follows, and specific literature on online deliberation supports this discussion. Arguments counter to the efficacy of deliberative democracy in the digital era, such as those put forth by Australian media theorist Ned Rossiter (2006), set up my argument for crowdsourcing as an appropriate deliberative model for online engagement going forward. Ultimately, I employ Beth Simone Noveck's (2003) recommendations for designing effective deliberative processes online to determine if participants at Next Stop Design perceived the project as an effective model for public participation. Next, I present a number of crowdsourcing cases classified into a typology, revealing the diverse ways crowdsourcing ventures can be executed for different problems and contexts, but all within a guiding definition. Crowdsourcing is a mediated 11 process, and thus uses and gratifications theories are useful for understanding why these online communities-"crowds"-participate in crowdsourcing arrangements. I discuss the larger concept of participatory culture, as well as examine the many reasons why individuals use and desire interaction with new media. Across several crowdsourcing cases, a body of motivations data has emerged. I detail these known motivators in crowdsourcing arrangements and ultimately conclude that motivations for participation in crowdsourcing are complex and vary, but several motivators occur across many contexts. I conclude this section by synthesizing the research on motivations in crowdsourcing specifically, and participatory online culture generally, into nine broad motivational categories in order to operationalize the concepts in RQ2 for the study. Next Stop Design provided a unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in a public participation context, as well as assess why the crowd participated in the project. The two large theoretical discussions in this chapter develop a structure within which to execute the study. Deliberative Democracy The tenets of deliberation and democracy are rooted in a very long history of political thought, "traced to Dewey and Arendt and then further back to Rousseau and even Aristotle" (Bohman, 1998, p. 400). Yet, it is the use of "deliberative democracy" that appeared in the early 1980s (Bessette, 1980) that tipped off an intense scholarly interest in the concept that continues just as vibrantly today. Many versions of deliberative democratic theory have emerged in the recent proliferation of research on the topic, and there have been review articles dedicated to organizing these diverse interpretations of the theory in recent years (Bächtiger, 12 Niemeyer, Neblo, Steenbergen, & Steiner, 2010; Bohman, 1998; Chambers, 2003; Freeman, 2000; Thompson, 2008). Synthesizing the contributions of the "main advocates of deliberative democracy (Habermas, Rawls, Joshua Cohen, Michelman, Sunstein, Gutmann, Thompson, and Estlind, among others)," Freeman (2000) provides a neat, if lengthy, definition of "the primary features of the political ideal of deliberative democracy": Conceived as an ideal of political relations, a deliberative democracy is one in which political agents or their representatives (a) aim to collectively deliberate and vote (b) their sincere and informed judgments regarding (c) measures conducive to the common good of citizens. (d) Political agents are seen and see one another as democratic citizens who are politically free and equal participants in civic life. (e) A background of constitutional rights and all-purpose social means enable citizens to take advantage of their opportunities to participate in public life. (f) Citizens are individually free in that they have their own freely determined conceptions of the good, and these conceptions are publicly seen as legitimate even though they are independent of political purposes. Moreover, (g) free citizens have diverse and incongruous conceptions of the good, which are constitutionally protected by basic rights. Because of this diversity (h) citizens recognize a duty in their public political deliberations to cite public reasons- considerations that all reasonable citizens can accept in their capacity as democratic citizens-and to avoid public argument on the basis of reasons peculiar to their particular moral, religious, and philosophical views and incompatible with public reason. (i) What makes these reasons public is that they are related to and in some way advance the common interests of citizens. (j) Primary among the common interests of citizens are their freedom, independence, and equal civic status. (p. 382) Deliberative democracy is a normative theory that aims to prescribe ideals for which democratic practice can strive. It runs counter to individualistic conceptions of democratic participation and focuses more on "talk-centric" forms of participation emphasizing the common good, vibrant discussion among equals, and consensus (Chambers, 2003, p. 308). Rather than aggregating the votes of self-interested individuals to declare a majority opinion, deliberative democracy strives for discussion among individuals about common interests. Voting can accompany effective deliberative process 13 as a way to define an outcome of a deliberation, but the difference between deliberation-informed voting and self-interested, nondeliberative voting is that individuals consider these common interests in the former kind. Or, as Chambers (2003) notes, voting "is given a more complex and richer interpretation in the deliberative model than in the aggregative model" (p. 308). Mansbridge (2010) extends this discussion, and ultimately blurs this distinction, by acknowledging that all individuals, no matter their commitment to the common good, are inherently to a degree self-interested. She argues first that a diverse citizenry will always produce "irresolvable conflicts" and thus "deliberatively authorize certain non-deliberative democratic mechanisms," such as voting (Mansbridge, 2010, pp. 64-65). And second, Mansbridge urges disclosure of self-interest in deliberative democracy because it "reduces the possibility of exploitation and obfuscation, introduces information that facilitates reasonable solutions and the identification of integrative outcomes, and also motivates vigorous and creative deliberation" (pp. 72-73). In other words, the presence of specific individuals' personal interests in a deliberation is necessary in the first place to map the contours of the public good. Also, in the end, if a vote or other nondeliberative mechanism occurs after a considered deliberation, at the very least, minority parties in a conflict will more likely accept the outcome as legitimate than they would in an aggregative voting scheme involving no prior deliberation. Some scholars attempt to shift the focal point of deliberative democracy away from rational consensual outcomes and toward the agonistic values of productive conflict itself. Mouffe's (2000) conception of the agonistic democracy assumes the impossibility of rational consensus, since conflict among diverse citizens will both always exist and 14 will likely involve emotional (nonrational) bases. Knops (2007) subsumes agonism under the umbrella of deliberative democracy, but Gürsözlü (2009) points out that this is a gross misreading of Mouffe. Agonistic democracy, Gürsözlü (2009) states, is focused on the emergence of differing opinions through conflict, but pays no attention to rational consensus. On the other hand, rational consensus is the chief aim of deliberative democracy, and agonism and deliberation ought to be seen as very different interpretations of the value and purpose of diversity and debate. Theoretical development in the way of deliberative democracy has outpaced empirical research, and there is some claim that theories and empirical research about the subject are disconnected (Nino, 1996; Thompson, 2008). The existing empirical findings are mixed, but some core trends are emerging from a variety of studies on the practice, potential, and efficacy of deliberation. Delli Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs (2004) enumerate these trends in the empirical literature: 1) "enough Americans engage in public talk" and seem equipped and willing to engage in democratic deliberation; 2) democratic deliberation "can lead to some of the individual and collective benefits postulated by democratic theorists"; 3) the "Internet may prove a useful tool in increasing [deliberation's] use by and utility for citizens"; and 4) "the impact of deliberation and other forms of discursive politics is highly context dependent." (p. 336) These first two trends indicate that there may be motivation among citizens to accept democratic deliberation and that deliberation may actually improve upon other forms of 15 democratic participation. The third trend above hints at the potential for new media technologies to enlarge the capacities of deliberation, which I will discuss later in this chapter. The fourth trend reminds us that there is no perfect recipe for deliberative democracy, and that each instance requiring public input must be individually considered according to its specific parameters. Landwehr (2010) thinks understanding the "context conditions for successful and democratic deliberation . . . remains the most important challenge for deliberative theory and deliberative politics" (p. 120). This point also speaks volumes to the practical importance of designing and moderating deliberative spaces and opportunities according to a given issue and citizenry. Some scholars in recent years have even begun to propose practical implementations, blueprints, and policies for deliberative democracy, following the trajectory of theory and empirical research. Leib (2004), for instance, proposes an entirely new fourth branch of government in the U.S.- a popular branch-that would bring panels of citizens into deliberative engagements to craft policy and respond to administrative needs. Public Participation in Urban Planning I turn now to a specific context where deliberative democratic principles are attempted in practice: public participation programs for urban planning. A robust body of planning literature has acknowledged the benefits of public participation in planning processes (Creighton, 2005; Forester, 2006; Hou & Kinoshita, 2007; Pimbert & Wakeford, 2001). At most, public participation can be seen as a logical extension of the democratic process in more local, direct, deliberative ways (Pimbert & Wakeford, 2001). And at the very least, involving citizens in the planning process helps ensure a plan that will be more widely accepted by its future users (Brody, Godschalk, & Burby, 2003; 16 Burby, 2003; Miraftab, 2003). As Crewe (2001) found in an analysis of citizen participation in the Boston Southwest Corridor project in the 1970s and 1980s, "[t]he more designers value the input of citizens, the more appropriate their designs will be for the users concerned" (p. 439). Extending this notion, Fiskaa (2005) posits that "[t]he purpose of public participation is of course to obtain better plans, meaning that they are well accepted by most, and therefore easier to carry out" (pp. 160-161). Other benefits for public participation in urban planning involve the valuing of nonexpert or nonmainstream knowledge brought into the creative problem solving process of planning. Participation is the act of creating new knowledge, contributing new perspectives to the planning process, and diffusing knowledge to others in the process (Hanna, 2000). Van Herzele (2004) found that inclusion of nonexpert knowledge was beneficial to the planning process in general, since the perspectives of individuals outside of the professional bubble of urban planning can (re)discover creative solutions that could work in a specific local context. To enlarge the discussion to the realm of innovation research as well, several studies (Jeppesen & Lakhani, in press; Lakhani, Jeppesen, Lohse, & Panetta, 2007; von Hippel, 2005) have found tremendous success when non-experts and those on the margins of a discipline engage in scientific problem solving and product design, often with solutions superior and more cost-effective than traditional research and development programs. Corburn (2003) urges that "local knowledge should never be ignored by planners seeking to improve the lives of communities experiencing the greatest risks" especially (p. 420). Corburn (2003) goes on to define local knowledge and its purpose in the public planning process. Adapted from Corburn (2003), local knowledge is: 17 • Knowledge of specific characteristics, circumstances, events, and relationships, as well as important understandings of their meaning, in local contexts or settings; • Often acquired through life experience and is mediated through cultural tradition; • Rarely a hunch or spontaneous intuition but rather evidence of one's eyes tested through years if not generations of experiences; and • Legitimated through public narratives, community stories, street theater, and other public forums, as opposed to professional knowledge which is generally tested through peer review, in the courts, or through the media. (p. 421) It is immodest to think that only professional planners can develop planning solutions, and perhaps more so to think that experts can identify precisely which and how many nonexperts would be of value to a project. Local knowledge and nonexpert knowledge adds the perspective of the future user of a designed space and the insights about environment and place that the planning discipline might never have approached or might have already forgotten (Burby, 2003; Laurian, 2003). Urban planners continually struggle to enlarge the participation process, to maximize and diversify stakeholder input in the designing of solutions for urban problems. In theory, making participation processes more inclusive and representative makes sense and resonates with the principles of deliberative democracy. In practice, though, the facilitation of a public planning meeting has its challenges for spurring participation and for drawing out creative solutions from the future users of public spaces (Campbell & Marshall, 2000; Carp, 2004; Hibbard & Lurie, 2000; Hou & Kinoshita, 2007; Innes, Connick, & Booher, 2007). 18 In fact, a counter body of literature has emerged that challenges these broad, rosy promises of public involvement in planning, citing local exceptions and small-scale public participation failures based on specific cases and long-range studies. These mixed results align with the mixed results from empirical studies in deliberative democracy, such as Pelletier, Kraak, McCullum, Uusitalo, and Rich's (1999) and Scholl's (2001) studies. Ryfe (2005) and Delli Carpini et al. (2004) offer two syntheses of these mixed empirical findings in deliberative democracy cases. In urban planning, for example, Abram and Cowell (2004) argue that success in public participation may be culture-specific, noting that Norwegians are more apt to be involved in public planning due to a general expectation of transparency in government and due to Norwegians' generally high rates of activity in political parties. Likewise, some cultures have differing levels of transparency in government and various barriers of public participation in government processes (Alfasi, 2003). Lane (2003) challenges the inherent democratic potential of local knowledge, particularly when processes fail to incorporate local knowledge meaningfully. Nance and Ortolano (2007) argue that success in public participation may be project-specific, noting that public participation in a Brazilian urban sanitation plan had mixed results relating to performance of the plan. Furthermore, while public participation can be a conscious way to incorporate the ideas and feelings of minority groups typically underrepresented in policymaking, Beebeejaun (2006) warns of inclusion of ethnic groups in particularist ways that separate those minority groups from the mainstream. Further still, tokenism and the reinforcement of essentialist categories of difference in conspicuous inclusion of 19 minority representation may be counterproductive to the greater project of interrogating power inequities in a community (Beebeejaun, 2006). Brody (2003) highlights the relative absence of empirical evidence of success in public participation as well, pointing out that "[h]igh levels of participation may increase conflict by having disputing parties at the negotiating table" and "frustrate planners by slowing down the decision-making process" (pp. 409-410, emphasis added). It is not only planners who experience frustration in these instances. A number of empirical studies in deliberative democratic process confirm that individuals experience more anxiety, frustration, self-doubt, and regret following deliberation than they felt before deliberation (Button & Mattson, 1999; Cook & Jacobs, 1999; Holt, 1999; Kimmelman & Hall, 1997). Adding to this general qualifying of the potential of public participation in planning, Burby (2003) reminds us that "planners themselves can stifle participation by the choices they make about public involvement" (p. 34). Specifically, the ways planners conduct meetings and inject their own wit and personal facilitation style may work to either limit or enhance planning subjects' impact on material outcomes (Carp, 2004). The very presence of special interest groups in the planning process, who show up to planning meetings representing the interests of some facet of the public, may intimidate the average citizen with elaborate charts, maps, empirical evidence, and expert advice, thus deterring future involvement by nonexperts in the community (Hibbard & Lurie, 2000). Nonverbal communicative actions and unrelated small talk by various citizens in the actual spaces of public meetings also work to "script" the power grabs that occur during the actual public participation segments of planning meetings (Campbell & Marshall, 2000). Furthermore, recent studies from Hou and Kinoshita (2007) and Innes et al. (2007) 20 found that the degree of informality employed during the public participation process affected the ways in which citizens were able to contribute to the development of the plan and see themselves as effective actors in the solving of problems. Forester (2006) reminds us that "[e]asy to preach but difficult to practice, effective public participation in planning and public management calls for sensitivity and technique, imagination and guts" (p. 447). These many articles that caution against the optimistic view of deliberation in public participation could be collectively seen as a series of exceptions to the rule, studies hinging on narrow case studies where a public involvement program was soured by specific interpersonal dynamics or exceptional local circumstances. I believe, however, these cases and the literature illustrate simultaneously that public participation is an important thing to strive for in a public process and that face-to-face public participation is inherently an imperfect process. Traditional public participation methods should not be devalued, for these methods have generally served us well in the past, and no method is perfect. But when we consider the medium of the Internet, for instance, where anonymity for users is available and where body language, identity politics, and interpersonal power dynamics are absent or changed, we can begin to ameliorate some of the common pitfalls of public participation that this body of counter literature on public involvement identifies. Simply put, with so many shortcomings in executing the face-to-face public participation component of a planning project, we should begin to think beyond the bounds of what might constitute public involvement in the first place and begin to think beyond face-to-face means, to think about digital possibilities. 21 The Medium of the Internet The Internet enables a kind of networked, creative thinking, and encourages the mind to wander down winding paths to unknown mental explorations. Take, for instance, how hypertext can lead one down a rabbit hole of browsing. Other aspects of the Internet that make it an ideal medium for facilitating creative participation include its temporal flexibility, reach, anonymity, interactivity, and its ability to carry every other form of mediated content. The Internet is an instant communications platform, where messages, and thus idea exchange, can travel so fast along its channels that the medium works in effect to virtually erase the issue of time, accelerating creative development. Furthermore, the Internet has a more or less global reach, or it least it can have a thoroughly global reach. This means that communication can take place between people in different places rapidly. Coupled with the virtual erasure of time, this global character of the Internet works to also erase space. Carey (1989) first best pondered the cultural transformations and the societal capabilities of communications technologies unmoored from time and space, noting that inventions like the telegraph that accomplished this erasure worked to unite nations in common cultural visioning. In contrast to the speed of the Internet is the fact that the Internet is at the same time an asynchronous mode. That is, online bulletin board systems and similar applications enable users to post commentary and ideas to a virtual "location" at one point in time, and though the speed of the Internet tends to make users hasty in their online posts, asynchrony allows other users to engage those thoughts at much later points in time in measured deliberation. Much like the leaving and taking of notes on a bulletin board in a town square, the Internet can foster a sense of ongoing dialogue between 22 members of a community without those members having to be present at the same time (Ostwald, 1997/2000). This capability of the Internet is already being realized in some urban planning projects, as posting podcasts and meeting minutes on planning project Web sites is an exploitation of the Internet's asynchrony and virtual permanence, particularly if these kinds of project Web sites are coexistent with online bulletin board systems. Planning decisions are not about the will of the simple majority. They are about the ways in which communities provide qualitative commentary on how they want to see their future built environment. In an online context, individuals make qualitative input available primarily through online bulletin board systems and other modes of asynchronous communication. Ideally, according to the principles of deliberative democracy, individuals incorporate discussion and exchange as they develop a series of individual solutions to contribute to a commons. The asynchronous nature of the Internet is important for this development. Taken together, the speed and asynchrony of the Internet make for a temporal flexibility, the medium conforming to the needs and uses of the particular user, converging different speeds and usage patterns together in a collaborative project online that may be either synchronous ("real time") or asynchronous. Furthermore, the Internet is an anonymous medium. Users are able to develop their own online identities largely on their own terms, or they can choose to remain anonymous entirely. In a chat room or bulletin board system, for example, people can develop whole new personas or design entirely differently-bodied avatars to represent themselves and their interests. In line with much of the scholarly literature on nonverbal 23 communication, Campbell and Marshall's (2000) discovery that people's body language, positioning in the space of a room, and small talk work to "script" the ensuing power dynamics of a planning meeting is relevant here. In an online environment, people are free to contribute to online discussions and the vetting of ideas without the burden of nonverbal politics. That is to say nothing of the very real power inequities at play with embodied forms of difference, such as race, gender, and (dis)ability, inequities buttressed many times over by empirical research in communication, sociology, health, psychology, and other disciplines. The medium of the Internet can work to liberate people from the constraints of identity politics and performative posturing by endowing users with the possibility for anonymity in participatory functions (Sotarauta, 2001). They can become, as Suler (2004) claims, "disinhibited" and expressive. Finally, the Internet is an interactive technology and a site of convergence, where all other forms of media can be utilized. Rather than the simple transmission mode of information native to "older" forms of media (e.g., television, radio, newspaper) and much policy, the Internet encourages ongoing cocreation of new ideas. Content on the Internet is generated through a mix of bottom-up (content from the people) and top-down (content from policy-makers, businesses, and media organizations) processes, as opposed to solely a top-down model. It would seem that public participation programs folded into urban planning processes try to achieve this meeting in the middle of ideas from the "bottom" (the people) and from the "top" (the administration), but as discussed below, this stilted format for idea exchange-idealized in deliberative democracy-may be outdated in the digital era. To some, the Internet has many shortcomings, including the ways in which the Internet may alienate us from our neighbors interpersonally and the 24 ways some companies seek to position Internet users as consumers ripe for profit (Bugeja, 2005; Putnam, 2000). In a "Web 2.0" era of increased content creation, though, Internet users are becoming particularly savvy at broadcasting their own ideas, uncovering buried information, and remixing previous ideas and content into new, innovative forms. Internet users are potentially problem solvers, are potentially creative. We should turn to the Internet to transform the public participation process, to enlarge our narrow perspective on how citizens actually participate in democracies today (T. C. Mack, 2004). Collective Intelligence, Wise Crowds, and Problem Solving Another capability of the Internet is its ability to bring the kernels of wisdom from individual users together for a single purpose. If one reason for valuing local or non-expert knowledge is that new ideas may emerge that might never have been thought of within the bounds of the profession and the bureaucracy of the firm, then the question is how best to maximize this input. Presumably, a scaling-up of the public involvement process and a more concerted effort to recruit nonexperts into the planning process would do the trick, but such actions are costly and labor-intensive. On the Internet, though, the unidentified, nonexpert talent is out there, accessible through its seemingly infinite scaled-up platform. The Internet boom in the mid-1990s was related to this vast landscape of diverse users. Narrow niche businesses sprang up in the dot-com gold rush, eager to use the reach of the Internet to attract a collective of shoppers with the most obscure tastes and needs. There was, of course, a limit to what the market would support in online micro-niche commerce, as was seen in the 2000 dot-com crash (Flichy, 2001/2007). Yet, the lesson here is that if businesses gambled heavily on the Internet's 25 reach to deliver them enough customers pulled from the digital woodwork, then planners can and should seek latent talent on the Internet for their projects. This might better be understood by what Anderson (2006) calls a "long tail" effect. At the time of the Web's awakening, Lévy (1995/1997) wrote: 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) Since "no one knows everything, everyone knows something, [and] all knowledge resides in humanity," we must consciously adopt the technologies and methods that harness this talent (Lévy, 1995/1997, pp. 13-14). Lévy was an optimist. He called this far-flung genius collective intelligence, a "form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills" (Lévy, 1995/1997, p. 13). His logical choice to harness this intellect is the Internet, and for reasons that resonate with Rossiter's (2006) argument for a new, networked democratic process: Cyberspace designates the universe of digital networks as a world of interaction and adventure, the site of global conflicts, a new economic and cultural frontier. There currently exists in the world a wide array of literary, musical, artistic, even political cultures, all claiming the title of "cyberculture." But cyberspace refers less to the new media of information transmission than to original modes of creation and navigation within knowledge, and the social relations they bring about. . . . It is designed to interconnect and provide an interface for the various methods of creation, recording, communication, and simulation. (Lévy, 1995/1997, pp. 118-119) Given the will to act, problem solving with collective intelligence and networks can be scaled-up to address even global concerns (Ignatius, 2001). Several modes of 26 technology-many of them Internet-based-already exist to encourage global communication and problem solving (Masum & Tovey, 2006). An interesting thing happens when enough talent becomes collected in efficient ways, even without the aid of the Internet to harness all ideas: people can become collectively smarter. James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, examines several cases of crowd wisdom at work, where the very success of a solution is dependent on its emergence from a large body of solvers. Based on several empirical investigations, Surowiecki (2004) finds that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them" (p. xiii). This wisdom of crowds is derived not from averaging solutions, but from aggregating them: After all, think about what happens if you ask a hundred people to run a 100- meter race, and then average their times. The average time will not be better than the time of the fastest runners. It will be worse. It will be a mediocre time. But ask a hundred people to answer a question or solve a problem, and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision making, it's often excellence. You could say it's as if we've been programmed to be collectively smart. (Surowiecki, 2004, p. 11) Scott E. Page (2007) extends Surowiecki's speculations on crowd wisdom to make a more sophisticated claim about diversity in problem solving environments in general. In some problem solving situations, the process benefits by having a number of individuals from cognitively diverse perspectives offer their solutions, even if those individuals are not themselves experts (Page, 2007). Additionally, Terwiesch and Xu (2008) found that "ideation problems" are suited for broadcasting to an online base of solvers. This means that issues involving the generation of unique designs and ideas are good candidates for opening up to an online community of individuals who might have something to say about the issue. 27 What may be the most promising about the Internet in a democratic sense is that not only does the Internet foster communication and collaboration among citizens, but if designed properly, a deliberative process online can be directed in such a way as to leverage collective intelligence from many participants for the purpose of solving a distinct problem. Terranova (2004) writes that the Internet is an ideal technology for distributed thinking because the Internet is "not simply a specific medium but a kind of active implementation of a design technique able to deal with the openness of systems" (p. 3). Fischer (2002) echoes this sentiment. That is, online deliberative processes need not just be "talk-centric," but they can be purposefully designed to solve problems presented by the state. I turn now to a discussion of online deliberation and then to democracy in organized networks before making my claim that one such participatory model-crowdsourcing-fulfills this specific problem solving need. Online Deliberation Bringing principles of deliberation and participation to an online setting seems a natural step in the evolution of these theories and technologies. Experiments in online deliberation have focused on replicating, supplementing, or even replacing the function of face-to-face democratic governance in a mediated arrangement. The understanding in these online deliberation ventures is that everyday citizens feel alienated from the process of democracy (and indeed also from their elected representatives), and the Internet may motivate citizens and bring their input back into the system (Macintosh, 2006). The features of the Internet are instructive here: the reach of the Internet allows more and far-flung citizens to engage in the democratic process; citizens can come and go in the process at their own convenience and participate at their own pace due to the temporal 28 flexibility of the Internet; anonymity afforded by the medium may encourage citizens to express their opinions freely and without fear of retribution; and the interactive and media-converged platform of the Internet allows for rich, cognitively engaging contributions to the process of democracy. Despite the promise of radically transforming governance with new technologies, though, Francis McDonough (as cited in Noveck, 2003) notes that there have so far been just "six generally-accepted phases of e-government: 1. providing information; 2. providing online forms; 3. accepting completed online forms; 4. handling single transactions; 5. handling multiple, integrated transactions; and 6. developing intergovernmental projects that require the restructuring of the government to allow the delivery of new integrated services" (p. 46). In other words, the potential for the Internet to turn citizens into creative collaborators with government rather than just users of government services online has mostly not yet been realized. An anthology was published in late 2009 that developed out of a series of conferences on online deliberation (Davies & Gangadharan, 2009). Its chapters, from leading thinkers in the field, come together in much the same way literature on deliberative democracy in general has come together over the years. That is, the contents of this anthology offer a collection of mixed results, context-specific lessons learned from online deliberation, and idealistic visions for online deliberation's future. Perhaps the 29 most valuable take-away section of the anthology-and indeed this claim could be applied to much of the body of literature on online deliberation-is the part focused on the design of online deliberation tools. Attempting to synthesize the whole of the literature on online deliberation, Gangadharan (2009) notes that online deliberation can be understood as a sociotechnical system that is coordinated or managed by a government institution, news outlet, civil society organization, corporation, educational body, or other institution (or set of institutions). Apart from the question of who manages such a project or endeavor, this level of online deliberation entails choices about the goals of deliberation, the software used to achieve those goals, the platforms that host the online deliberation experience, the modality of the user experience, the way in which participants are recruited, the types of participants being targeted, the context and scale of the user experience, the evaluation of deliberative goals, and the economics and managerial style of the deliberative endeavor. (pp. 340-341) Importantly, then, online deliberation systems and tools are hierarchically managed, have goals for participants, and are sociotechnical arrangements, meaning there is an emphasis on the ways humans and technologies work together toward these goals (as opposed to technologies operating autonomously or artificially and as opposed to humans merely using technologies to facilitate typical face-to-face processes). Fundamentally, online deliberative practices weave deliberative democratic principles together with the collaborative and communicative capabilities of new media technologies under the direction and authority of government institutions. Importantly, all of this is possible through the design of online deliberation tools from the outset (Noveck, 2003). Deliberative democracy enjoys "subjective legitimacy" that "consists of the generalized belief of the population in the moral justifiability of the government and its directives" (Nino, 1996, p. 8). In other words, the views of the people participating in a deliberative democracy work to legitimize a regime's design and function through 30 continued participation. Thus, to appraise a deliberative democratic tool or process, one could gather input from citizens and compare attitudes about the process against a set of normative ideal features of deliberative democracy. Legal scholar Beth Simone Noveck wrote in 2003 of the need to design truly deliberative spaces in cyberspace. Her call for better processes and systems to improve governance and democracy in this article was later echoed in a book-length treatment (Noveck, 2009), and her authority on the topic of e-democracy and her direction of the Peer-to-Patent project landed her an appointment in the Obama Administration as Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government. Her principles for ideal online democratic process are enumerated here as a functional heuristic and provide the concepts for which I operationalize RQ1 in the study. I use Noveck's list of ideals for online deliberative democracy in this study, rather than those of another scholar, for three reasons. First, Noveck's reflections on ideal online deliberative democratic process in light of her involvement with the successful public crowdsourcing project Peer-to-Patent and her role in President Obama's groundbreaking initiatives in government technology, participation, and transparency make her a leading voice on this issue. Second, she positions her research on deliberative democracy from the standpoint of a lawyer interested in issues of new media technology in governance, and her practical activities in deploying online deliberative democratic tools have informed her theoretical contributions. Her work is that of an active critical media designer, not just a philosopher, so her distillation of ideal features reflects issues of both the theory and practice of online deliberative democracy. Third, and most importantly, her ideal features of deliberative democracy assemble the major topics from 31 all of the current literature. Chambers (2003), Freeman (2000), Mansbridge (2010), Delli Carpini et al. (2004), and other scholars each write about one or more of the ideal features of deliberative democracy, but Noveck's (2003) work is arguably the best recent single summary of the literature. She even points out that "[t]hough many theorists extol [deliberative democracy's] virtues, rarely do commentators define what it actually is and what features comprise a deliberative process," and then proceeds with defining these "building blocks of deliberation [to] allow us to construct participatory processes" (Noveck, 2003, p. 12). Her comprehensive list of ideals is reflective of the major trends in deliberative democratic theory and functions as an effective heuristic with which to appraise the effectiveness of an online deliberative democratic tool or process. The reason we have yet to realize the full potential of new media technologies for democratic processes, according to Noveck (2003), is that "[t]he spaces we inhabit in cyberspace currently are constructed around the goals of commerce" and that these "[v]alue choices translate into design choices" (p. 11). That is, because the Internet is a largely privatized technology and many users use the Internet largely for e-commerce and transactional activities, we have come to conceive of this technology as only capable of facilitating those activities and have designed e-government services in that image. To achieve any sort of effective deliberation online, and thus an effective democratic process online, Noveck (2003) offers 11 ideal features. According to Noveck (2003), these processes must be designed to be: • Accessible - "the space in which [deliberation] occurs-whether physical or virtual-has to be available to as wide a range of participants as possible"; 32 • Free of censorship - "the space needs to safeguard freedom of thought and expression"; • Autonomous - "the process must not treat [participants] as passive recipients of information, but as active participants in a public process"; • Accountable and relevant - "members of a community engage with one another in accountable and reasoned public discourse" and "cannot be anonymous to one another"; • Transparent - "the structure and rules of the space must be public so that citizens know who owns and controls the space, whether monitoring is taking place, and the origin of any information contributed to the discussion"; • Equal and responsive - "[i]n the constructed space, all participants must be equal players with like opportunities for access and voice" and "[t]he architecture cannot privilege one group over another"; • Pluralistic - "[r]ules or technology can be enlisted to regulate the space for deliberation" so that "viewpoints representing a broad spectrum are clearly expressed"; • Inclusive - "[e]ach participant must at least have the chance to be heard. Yet at the same time, a deliberative forum must be inclusive and open to all members of the relevant community; it cannot be [both] exclusionary and democratic"; • Informed - "deliberative dialogue cannot be divorced from information, and participants must have access to a wide variety of viewpoints in order to make effective and educated decisions"; 33 • Public - a dialogue "must be open, accessible, and explicitly dedicated to the interests of the group, rather than any individual or particular interest group"; and • Facilitated - some mechanism for "[m]oderation is essential to managing the work of groups or teams online or off" and "[t]he only way to manage the competing voices of a large number of participants is to facilitate the dialogue, highlighting what is productive and suppressing what is destructive" (pp. 12-17). Understanding if individuals perceive these 11 ideals manifesting through a given online participation process, then, is to understand how closely a designed system aligns with an ideal online deliberative democratic process. Or, put simply, this degree of alignment may indicate how effective such an online process is in terms of democracy and public participation and whether such a process is "subjectively legitimate" (Nino, 1996). This study operationalizes these ideals in a series of interviews with participants from Next Stop Design in order to gauge whether participants viewed the project as an effective online participation process. Democratic Process in Organized Networks It is worth discussing briefly why something like online deliberation (as it has so far been conceived) might not fit the contours of democracy as well as other methods in the realities of an increasingly networked information society. In light of moves to involve the public in urban planning, by law or voluntarily, in theory and in practice, the planning discipline has embraced the notion of a deliberative ideal of democracy. In this model, public consensus is desired to achieve a public good (a plan), and this consensus is reached through the meaningful discussion and negotiation of the diverse viewpoints of stakeholders (Pimbert & Wakeford, 2001). Traditional, offline planning committees and 34 public involvement meetings following the mantra of multistakeholderism and multiculturalism employ the many tools of deliberative democratic process, including juries, polls, and forums (Carson & Hartz-Karp, 2005). The deliberative democratic model even promises to be a "new [model] of collaboration between citizens, experts and decision-makers based on [a] new paradigm and assumptions" which may bring "greater wisdom to governance" and, by extension, greater wisdom to public plans (Hartz-Karp, 2007, p. 2). However, the deliberative democratic model assumes the successful functioning of representative democracy, which, as it is predicated on the vertical, hierarchical form of the nation-state, may be ineffective for the horizontal, distributive capacities of networks. The prominent current in the critical study of globalization tells us of the obsolescence of the nation-state, favoring instead a social order that acknowledges movement, flows (Appadurai, 1996), and an existence within organized networks that have co-emerged with digital technologies and information economies (Castells, 1996; Rossiter, 2006). The future focus ought to be on "relational processes not representational procedures" (Rossiter, 2006, p. 13). Deliberative democracy models are inadequate (Hull, 2000; Rossiter, 2006). As Rossiter (2006) puts it frankly: "It is time to abandon the illusion that the myths of representational democracy might somehow be transferred and realized within networked settings. That is not going to happen" (p. 95). The best plans feel as though they emerged from the community organically, as if they sprung from the public in ways that enable all bodies to see themselves happily in a space. Lao Tzu knew that good leadership was the kind where leaders empowered others to feel a sense of ownership over their successes. Good leadership, effective democracy, 35 well executed public involvement campaigns-each emphasizes the process of citizens achieving, realizing possibilities, and strengthening relationships. Urban planning is nothing if not the reaching for these ideals in the built environment. Forms like the crowdsourcing model can tap the possibilities for digital communication networks to mobilize citizens, foster creative input, and produce plans through democratic processes that more accurately address our lived experience within organized networks today. Kriplean, Beschastnikh, Borning, McDonald, and Zachry (2009) argue for the need to design new media systems that create "sockets" between governments and citizens in order to produce (or, rather, cocreate) solutions for the public good through the combined efforts of everyday people and administrators. Following this and considering Noveck's (2003) ideals for online participation and deliberative process, I will make the case in the remainder of this chapter that the crowdsourcing model fills this need for a "socket" and can be used to leverage citizen input in new urban planning contexts effectively online, all while remaining true to the ideals of deliberation. Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving Jeff Howe (2006a) coined the term crowdsourcing in an issue of Wired magazine. The term describes a new Internet-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals through what amounts to an open call for proposals. In a companion blog to his breakthrough article, Howe (2006b) defines the model in his own words: 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. (para. 4) 36 Howe (2006c) further clarifies that "it's only crowdsourcing once a company takes that design, fabricates [it] in mass quantity and sell[s] it" (para. 1). In other words, a company posts a problem online, a vast number of individuals offer solutions to the problem, the winning ideas are awarded some form of a bounty, and the company mass produces the idea for its own gain. Crowdsourcing can be seen as a problem solving model because, in a problem solving sense (Jonassen, 2003), the "goal state" of a company is to acquire innovative, sellable, original ideas. The company's "task environment" or "problem space" for this acquisition process occurs through a contest-type format through the company's Web site. The "problem" the company needs solved varies, but generally consists of needing a product designed or a scientific problem cracked. And the company's "solutions" come from the online community of participants-the "crowd"-in the form of submissions to the site. Crowdsourcing is a blend of open creative process and typical top-down program management. Some of the notable business case studies of crowdsourcing help illustrate both how the model functions and how the model resembles a problem solving process akin to public participation and deliberation in the service of the public good. Syntheses of these several case studies can be found in Howe's original article (2006a), his book (Howe, 2008), and in my own work (Brabham, 2008a; Friedland & Brabham, 2009). A typology of various crowdsourcing cases turns up four dominant approaches: the knowledge discovery and management approach; the broadcast search approach; the peer-vetted creative production approach; and distributed human intelligence tasking (Friedland & Brabham, 2009). 37 The Knowledge Discovery and Management Approach The Peer-to-Patent Community Patent Review project is an exemplar of the knowledge discovery and management approach to crowdsourcing (Noveck, 2006). Peer-to- Patent was a pilot project from 2007 to 2009 between New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), with support from a number of major corporate patent holders. In the Peer-to-Patent project, the USPTO siphoned off a small number of patent applications it received to an online community. This online community of more than 2,000, working for no monetary reward, reviewed applications for evidence of "prior art," and these findings are routed back to the USPTO. Overburdened and backlogged with patent applications, the USPTO then used these findings to help determine whether new patents should be awarded. In this approach, online communities were challenged to uncover existing knowledge in the network, thus amplifying the discovery capabilities of an organization with limited resources. In terms of knowledge management, applications in the spirit of "commons-based peer production" (Benkler, 2002) enabled an online community to collect, edit, and otherwise manage the knowledge base in distributed ways; Wikipedia is an exemplar case of this process. At Wikipedia, a collaboratively produced encyclopedia, participants are free to write articles for the collection or to edit existing entries, all on a platform that is simpler to use than HTML and that automatically connects relevant articles together. Both Peer-to-Patent and Wikipedia essentially task an online community to find and organize information; in the former case, this tasking is more hierarchically organized, while in the latter it is a decentralized process. Peer-to-Patent more closely embodies the crowdsourcing definition than Wikipedia for this reason, but 38 both cases are important for understanding the capabilities of crowds. In each case, the more users there are and the more involved they are, the better the system functions. The Broadcast Search Approach InnoCentive, founded in 2002, focuses on providing research and development solutions for a broad range of topic areas, from biomedical and big pharmaceutical concerns to engineering and computer science topics. It boasts a community of 64 client companies, called "Seekers," and 165,000 "Solvers," offering cash rewards ranging from US$5,000 to US$1 million. According to Lakhani et al. (2007), "[s]olution requirements for the problems are either ‘reduction to practice' (RTP) submissions, i.e., requiring experimentally validated solutions, such as actual chemical or biological agents or experimental protocols, or ‘paper' submissions, i.e., rationalized theoretical solutions codified through writing" (p. 5). Submitted solutions are never seen by other Solvers; only Seekers pour over submissions. The problem set consists of difficult, if well defined and scoped, scientific and engineering challenges, such as finding a biomarker that tracks the progress of ALS disease for a US$1 million reward. Seekers can post a range of rewards and requirements for deliverables, while Solvers are rewarded individually by the Seeker companies in exchange for their intellectual property. Lakhani et al. (2007) conducted a statistical analysis of the InnoCentive service between 2001 and 2006. They found that the Solver community was able to solve 29% of the problems the Seekers-all large companies with internal labs and researchers-posted after they were unable to solve these problems internally. Moreover, the results found a positive correlation between the distance the Solver was from the field in which the problem was presented and the likelihood of 39 creating a successful solution. That is, Solvers on the margins of a disciplinary domain- outsiders to a given problem's domain of specialty-performed well in solving the problem. The Goldcorp Challenge is a similar broadcast search crowdsourcing case (Tischler, 2007). Goldcorp, a Canadian gold mining company, developed the Challenge in March 2000. According to a company press release, "participants from around the world were encouraged to examine the geologic data [from Goldcorp's newly acquired Red Lake Mine in Ontario] and submit proposals identifying potential targets where the next six million ounces of gold will be found" ("Goldcorp Challenge Winners!," 2001, para. 6). By offering more than US$500,000 in prize money to 25 top finalists who identified the most gold deposits, Goldcorp attracted "more than 475,000 hits" to the Challenge's Web site and "more than 1,400 online prospectors from 51 countries registered as Challenge participants" ("Goldcorp Challenge Winners!," 2001, para. 6). The numerous solutions from the crowd confirmed many of Goldcorp's suspected deposits and identified several new ones, 110 deposits in all. Goldcorp's subsequent Global Search Challenge, with US$2 million in cash and capital investments available for winning, launched in 2001. Broadcast search approaches to crowdsourcing are oriented towards finding the "lone gunman" specialist scientist with time on their hands, probably outside the direct field of expertise of the problem, who is capable of adapting previous work to produce a solution. In theory, the wider the net cast by the crowdsourcing organization, the more likely the company will turn up the "lone gunman" or the "needle in the haystack." 40 The Peer-Vetted Creative Production Approach Though the concept of broadcasting a challenge to an online community is the same, the Threadless online community functions differently than InnoCentive or Peer-to- Patent. Howe (2006d) calls Threadless one of the exemplar cases of crowdsourcing: "pure, unadulterated (and scalable) crowdsourcing." Based in Chicago and formed in late 2000, Threadless is the flagship property of parent company skinnyCorp, whose motto is "skinnyCorp creates communities" ("skinnyCorp," n.d.). Threadless is an online clothing company, and as of June 2006, Threadless was "selling 60,000 t-shirts a month, [had] a profit margin of 35 per cent [sic] and [was] on track to gross [US]$18 million in 2006," all with "fewer than 20 employees" (Howe, 2006d, para. 1). At Threadless, the ongoing challenge to the registered members of the online community is to design and select silk-screen t-shirts. Members can download t-shirt design templates and color palettes for desktop graphics software packages, such as Adobe Illustrator, and create t-shirt design ideas. They then upload the designs to a gallery on the Threadless Web site, where the submissions remain in a contest for a week. Members vote on designs in the gallery during this time on a five-point rating scale. At the end of the week, the highest rated designs are finalist candidates for printing, and the Threadless staff chooses about five designs to mass produce each week. These "t-shirts are then produced in short production runs and sold on the site," back to members in the online community (as well as to unregistered visitors to the site) through a typical online storefront (Fletcher, 2006, p. 6). Threadless awards winning designers US$2,000 in cash and US$500 in Threadless gift certificates in exchange for their intellectual property. 41 The logic of Threadless-and similar cases, such as user-generated advertising contests (Brabham, 2009)-is that by opening up the creative phase of a designed product to a potentially vast network of Internet users, some superior ideas will exist among the flood of submissions. And further still, the peer vetting process will simultaneously identify the best ideas and collapse the market research process into an instance of firm-consumer cocreation. It is a system where a "good" solution is also the popular solution, and a solution the market will support. Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking Different still from the previous cases is Amazon Mechanical Turk (Barr & Cabrera, 2006). At Mechanical Turk, "Requesters" can use the site to coordinate a series of simple tasks they need accomplished by humans, tasks that computers cannot easily do, such as accurately tagging the content of images on the Internet for a search engine. Individuals in the Mechanical Turk community, known as "Turkers," can then sign up to accomplish a series of these "human intelligence tasks" (HITs) for very small monetary rewards paid by the Requester. Certainly the least creative and least intellectually demanding application for individuals in these kinds of online communities, Mechanical Turk essentially coordinates large-scale collections of simple tasks requiring human intelligence. It is similar to the concept of large-scale distributed computing projects, such as SETI@home and Rosetta@home, except replacing spare computing cycles with humans engaged in short cycles of labor. This kind of "distributed human intelligence tasking," so to speak, can be seen in other cases. For example, Subvert and Profit uses this format to coordinate the gaming of social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon (Powazek, 2007). Confidential clients pay 42 Subvert and Profit to distribute rating tasks for certain stories and Web sites to registered users, who can each make small amounts of money for performing the tasks. Crowdsourcing is one specific form of participatory social media, part of a greater "Web 2.0" spectrum that includes open source production, commons-based peer production, blogging, video-posting and photo sharing sites, massively multiplayer online games, and other forms. It is unique from these other forms in that it involves an organization-user relationship whereby the organization executes a top-down, managed process that seeks the bottom-up, open, creative input of users in an online community. Each of these various crowdsourcing approaches-knowledge discovery and management, broadcast search, peer-vetted creative production, and distributed human intelligence tasking-can be employed in specific contexts to accomplish certain goals. Depending on the type of input needed from a crowd of online participants and understanding what motivates these crowds to participate in a specific task environment, any number of new media tools could be designed to meet the needs of an organization in search of a solution to a problem. And why not design these tools to serve the public good, to make government function better and more democratically, rather than focus entirely on for-profit applications? Crowdsourcing may very well be a model for solving our world's most pressing social and environmental problems. Crowdsourcing is a legitimate, complex problem solving model, more than merely a new format for holding contests or awarding prizes. It is a model capable of aggregating talent and leveraging ingenuity while reducing the costs and time formerly needed to solve problems. I believe the model is promising for government and non-profit applications, and the Peer-to-Patent project suggests this business model's greater 43 use in public context. Urban planning projects can take up the model particularly as a means to enable public participation. In essence, any urban planning project is predicated on a problem. Typically that problem is how best to accommodate changing populations with different infrastructure, all while considering the interests of residents, developers, business owners, and the environment. If a problem can be framed clearly, and if all the data pertaining to a problem can be made available, then that problem can be crowdsourced. The traditional format for citizen involvement in planning projects has involved town hall meetings, workshops, and charrettes, but these face-to-face meetings have their limits in maximizing the creative input of citizens. This process needs to go online, and Next Stop Design provides a rich case for examining these issues in the study. I turn now to issues of motivation in crowdsourcing arrangements, as this provides the theoretical framework for RQ2. Moving the Crowd Uses and gratifications (U&G) theory assumes an active audience engaged with various media seeking certain gratifications. Throughout the evolution of U&G theory, some scholars have wrestled with exactly how active audiences really are, especially in the era when television seemed to lull individuals into passive receivers of information and entertainment (Levy & Windhal, 1984; Rubin, 1984; Windahl, 1981). However, since the popularity of new media technologies, such as the Internet, surged in the 1990s, U&G scholars have come to terms with the fundamentally interactive nature of these technologies that require in audiences a large degree of activity (Ruggiero, 2000). In an exhaustive review of U&G theoretical development over the years, Thomas E. Ruggiero (2000) writes that "[t]heoretically and practically, for U&G scholars, however, the basic 44 questions remain the same [in the new media era]. Why do people become involved in one particular type of mediated communication or another, and what gratifications do they receive from it?" (p. 29). Regarding gratifications, scholars have worked tirelessly to catalog individuals' media use, through self-reports in surveys and interviews as well as through observation and experimentation, to develop extensive typologies explaining how and why individuals use media. In fact, this emphasis on descriptive typologies, rather than on coherent theory-building, is one of the primary critiques of U&G theory (Elliott, 1974; Lometti, Reeves, & Bybee, 1977; Rosenstein & Grant, 1997; Swanson, 1977). Still, U&G typologies serve an important purpose early in the development of any new media technology or technique (Ruggiero, 2000), as scholars must first catalog basic usage habits to understand the role of a technology in an individual's life and its basic place in society. This helps to set the stage for more sophisticated research and theory-building later, as technologies mature and their social impacts are easier to grasp. Beginning in the 1970s, U&G scholars focused on "audience motivations and developed additional typologies of the uses people made of the media to gratify social and psychological needs" (Ruggiero, 2000, p. 6). These needs include, broadly, the needs for information, to develop or reinforce personal identity, to aide in one's integration and social interaction, and for entertainment (McQuail, 1983, pp. 82-83). U&G theory is akin to theories in social psychology concerning intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Deci and Ryan (1985) differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in their Self-Determination Theory (SDT). "Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions rather than for some separable 45 consequence," such as "for the fun or challenge entailed" (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 56). Likewise, extrinsic motivation "pertains whenever an activity is done in order to attain some separable outcome," such as financial reward, fame, or social pressure (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 60). Extrinsic and intrinsic motivators interact in such a way that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999), and in a specific scenario, participants may engage in an activity for a variety of reasons both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated (Lakhani et al., 2007; Brabham, 2008b). U&G theory suggests that individuals in the crowd are likely drawn to crowdsourcing applications for a number of reasons and that they are gratified in various ways through participation. The ways in which individuals use and are gratified by new media technologies differ from studies of individuals' use of "older" media technologies, such as newspapers and television. The primary categories of uses and gratifications that emerged from the many individual and collaborative efforts of Blumler, Katz, and Gurevitch in the 1970s (Blumler, 1979; Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974; Katz, Gurevitch & Haas, 1973), for example, are necessarily limited by the fact that the media of the time of those studies did not offer nearly as many interactive possibilities and user-productive modes as the digital technology of the Internet era (Ruggiero, 2000). Today, audiences do not merely use and seek pleasure from content; today, audiences are producers and consumers, what futurist Alvin Toffler (1980) called a "prosumer," of media content. This is not to say the behaviorist researchers of the "old" media era do not still have some relevance (Ruggiero, 2000). After all, their findings were important in that they discovered an audience that was not merely a passive receptacle for media content but was instead fundamentally interactive. Early uses and gratifications research 46 prophesized a moment when the pleasures of media interactivity would amplify if users were given media technologies that truly enabled production. The Internet, specifically given the recent Web 2.0 trend toward massive user-generated online content, is the vehicle for distributed, large-scale, pleasurable production. Henry Jenkins (2006) notes that we are now fully in a time of "participatory culture," which means a "culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices" (p. 3). Further, members of participatory culture "believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another" (Jenkins, 2006, p. 3). Supporting this, Liu, Liao, and Zeng (2007) found in a study of bloggers that "connecting with people" was the second most valued reward for blogging, behind the enjoyment of "pouring out feelings." For bloggers, and for other participants in social media arrangements, it matters to be able to express oneself and to have that expression met by others in the mediated space. Even within the broad concept of interactivity in the new media era, it has been suggested by Ha and James (1998) that five dimensions of interactivity may help U&G researchers understand the motivations of Internet users to engage with certain Web sites. These five dimensions are playfulness, choice, connectedness, information collection, and reciprocal communication (Ha & James, 1998). According to a user's need, a Web site may gratify a user by providing relevant information or playful diversion, which falls in line with long-standing broad motivations in U&G theoretical tradition, but on the Internet, individuals may also be motivated and gratified by the ability to connect with 47 entirely different sources of information (through hypermedia capabilities) and communicate with other individuals in the virtual space. Jenkins (2006) also emphasizes the importance of both play and reciprocal communication in motivating individuals in participatory culture to continue to improve their creative skills (p. 20). This reciprocity online is akin to (offline) notions of social capital (Putnam, 2000), and "[s]ocial capital is of critical importance in motivating people to share their individual contributions" online (Fischer, 2002, para. 82). Moving from social capital and reciprocity toward attention-seeking from peers, some studies suggest that individuals in participatory cultures are more likely and motivated to contribute content to various social media sites when they perceive that peers are consuming and valuing their content. For instance, Brzozowski, Sandholm, and Hogg (2009) note that social media spaces within large enterprises sustain more participation when individuals in the space receive comments on their contributions to the commons and other indicators of peer value. Huberman, Romero, and Wu (2009) note a similar phenomenon regarding the motivations of YouTube members to post videos to the site and to continue posting videos over time. Wu, Wilkinson, and Huberman (2009) call these important processes of attention-seeking and peer recognition "feedback loops." Indeed, social capital and reciprocity online may better be thought of as a kind of feedback loop ecology of sorts. Underlying feedback loops, though, individuals in participatory social media must also find some kind of pure enjoyment in participating, as Nov (2007) found in a survey of Wikipedia contributors, and individuals should have the opportunity to experience participation socially, with others, as Nov, Naaman, and Ye (2008) found in a study of content tagging at photo sharing site Flickr. Fun, 48 connectedness, and peer feedback appear to be consistent motivators across several studies of participatory culture. A wealth of recent studies into audience motivations for online media use have focused on the practice of open source software production. I tackle the issue of open source production motivators separately here, since it is important to distinguish open source from crowdsourcing. In the open source process, users essentially work for free to create software (Coar, 2006), which in itself undermines the power of simple extrinsic motivators such as money, and it also complicates intrinsic motivators. Several studies on motivation in open source participation (Bonaccorsi & Rossi, 2004; Ge, Dong, & Huang, 2006; Hars & Ou, 2002; Hertel, Niedner, & Herman, 2003) support what open source pioneer and founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds, predicted would be the primary motivator: the pleasure found in doing hobbies. As Torvalds states, "most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program" (Ghosh, 1998b, para. 63). In fact, as Lakhani and Wolf (2005) point out, though much theorizing on individual motivation in open source programming points to the primacy of extrinsic rewards, such as the opportunity for career advancement, intrinsic motivators, such as the enjoyment derived from building one's skills and solving tough coding problems, are more important. This emphasis on fun and self-fulfillment resonates with other motivational studies of social media (Liu et al., 2007; Nov, 2007; Smadja, 2009). Though similar, open source production is not the same as crowdsourcing, for a number of reasons I detail in the following paragraphs. Some of these differences relate to motivation. Many of the people tinkering with the source code for Linux, Mozilla 49 Firefox, or other open source projects are hobbyists who would be doing this kind of tinkering anyway. The payment for their service in producing a better version of a software application is perhaps recognition among other hobbyists, but, more importantly, the pursuit of the problem and the satisfaction in finding a better solution to the problem is payment enough (Bonaccorsi & Rossi, 2004; Ghosh, 1998b; Hars & Ou, 2002; Hertel et al., 2003; Lakhani & Wolf, 2005). There is an intrinsic, feel-good reward in solving the puzzle (Ghosh, 1998b; Raymond, 2003), and perhaps some social capital among fellow hobbyists if one succeeds (Ge, Dong, & Huang, 2006). Not all problems are as well suited for the open source model as software development. In simple economics, software can be produced with basically no overhead costs. The Linux or Mozilla programs exist virtually, in ones and zeroes, occupy no shelf space in a brick-and-mortar storefront, use no raw materials, emit no waste products, and the distribution is free-as easy as a download from a Web site. Not all products are composed of digital code; the overwhelming number of designed products in our built world are made from actual materials, require machines to produce, have real-world costs associated with distribution, and so on. What happens when the product that needs to be improved-or invented in the first place-actually has these kinds of material production costs? Will the hobbyist's interest in the problem, and his or her subsequent donation of free labor, account for the costs of producing the improved end product? A company investing in the capital to produce such a product would need to ensure at least enough sales to cover the investment. Thus, if the product will eventually be sold for a profit, would a human, with a natural degree of self-interest, reasonably want to donate his or her talent and energy to the project without a cut of the profits? In contrast to open source 50 production, crowdsourcing provides a clear format for compensating contributors, a hybrid model that blends the transparent and democratizing elements of open source into a feasible model for doing profitable business, all facilitated through the Internet. Further, winning crowdsourced solutions, because they are owned in the end by the company posting the call for solutions to its problem, have a monetary value relative to the potential to maximize profits from the solution. Because the ideas of the crowd can yield profits, those ideas can be relied upon to offset the costs of the material production. In other words, Threadless must eventually silk screen the crowd's ideas onto t-shirts, must incur the expenses of shipping the shirts, maintaining the Web site, renting the warehouse space, and buying the clothing and ink. Since the work of t-shirt production costs Threadless money, it reasonably must own the ideas it acquires from the crowd to guarantee no other clothing company can make the exact same shirts, lest the t-shirt design lose its exclusive aura, its endowment as a commodity, and its fetish appeal. InnoCentive and other crowdsourcing firms also make arrangements for intellectual property transfer from the crowd. For material objects to have cultural importance as commodities in capitalist societies, the idea driving the object must be somehow novel, rare, and coveted. Open source production works precisely against this notion by liberating code, making it available to everyone. For these reasons, open source production is not the same as crowdsourcing, and perhaps the most crucial distinction involves issues of motivation. Where open source models emphasize the common good (Bonaccorsi & Rossi, 2003, 2004; Lancashire, 2001) and hobbyist (Ghosh, 1998a, 1998b, 2005) interest in the success of certain applications, crowdsourcing models add to these factors the existence of a bounty. The 51 bounty can sometimes consist of cash and prizes, but it also includes cultural capital and can help people learn skills and develop portfolios for future work and entrepreneurship (S. Mack, 2006). In today's new media landscape, individuals have plenty of opportunities to make modest incomes from intermittent labor through various Web sites. These opportunities include "gold farming" (Knauer, 2008), participating in "human search engine" networks like ChaCha (Lagesse, 2008), and participating in income-generating crowdsourcing activities. We can conceivably add the opportunity to make money as a real motivator for Internet users today, and indeed some of the existing research on motivations in crowdsourcing applications specifically supports this. Smadja (2009) even suggests that organizations seeking to motivate online communities for various reasons should seek to make the participatory experience for individuals both profitable and fun in certain ratios. Some empirical research exists that helps to explain why individuals do what they do in crowdsourcing arrangements. Three quantitative surveys investigating the motivations of crowds paint a partial picture of how the opportunity to make money specifically, and other motivators generally, drive the crowd's participation in crowdsourcing applications. In a study of the crowd at iStockphoto, a kind of peer-vetted creative production-meets-distributed human intelligence tasking crowdsourcing case, I found that the opportunity to earn money (the bounty) and the opportunity to develop one's creative skills trumped the desire to network with friends and other creative people, and it outranked other altruistic motivations (Brabham, 2008b). At crowdsourcing company InnoCentive, Lakhani et al. (2007) found that intrinsic motivators, such as "enjoying problem solving and cracking a tough problem," as well as financial reward, 52 were significantly positively correlated to success as a solver on the site. In the crowd-made film Star Wreck, a peer-vetted creative production case, it was found that the crowd participated in the creation of the movie because it was fun for passing time and they liked sharing knowledge and skills with others, among other altruistic reasons, but not because they wanted to make money (Lietsala & Joutsen, 2007). Finally, a series of online interviews I conducted with the crowd at Threadless revealed that the opportunity to make money, the opportunity to develop one's creative skills, the potential to take up freelance work, and the love and addiction to the Threadless community were the primary motivators for participation (Brabham, in press). It is clear that a constellation of motivators exists across several crowdsourcing cases of varying types, but no one clear set of motivators applies to all crowdsourcing instances. Sometimes the opportunity to make money is a motivator for the crowd (e.g., Threadless, iStockphoto, InnoCentive), but sometimes it is not (e.g., Star Wreck). Sometimes the love of community is important for participants (e.g., Threadless, Star Wreck), sometimes it is not (e.g., iStockphoto), and so on. This speaks to the general difficulty in empirical research involving complex, context-specific cases. This difficulty is also noted in the deliberative democracy literature (Ryfe, 2005). Descriptive typologies would be valuable in these instances. Synthesizing the literature on motivation across a variety of social media instances-open source production, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogging, crowdsourcing, and more-I distill motivations for participation down to nine broad categories: • To make money • To advance one's career 53 • To be recognized by peers • To meet new people and socialize • To contribute to a collaborative effort • To have fun • To pass the time when bored • To learn new skills and knowledge • To express oneself Following the long tradition in U&G research of refining descriptive typologies, especially in the wake of new technologies and new media arrangements, I operationalize these nine broad motivational categories through interview questions with Next Stop Design participants. There is value in generating typologies of motivators through qualitative studies of new and unique mediated cases. "The theoretical product of many qualitative projects is the development or refinement of descriptive typologies" (Lindlof & Meyer, 1987, p. 11), and this study seeks to generate such a constellation of motivators from individuals in the Next Stop Design crowd. Interpreting the emergent motivators in conjunction with the findings in RQ1 regarding deliberative democratic process, this dissertation will ultimately contribute to communication theory an appraisal of the utility of crowdsourcing for online democratic process and added richness and refinement to motivational typologies for participatory online communities. Given the theoretical discussion in this chapter and the goals for the study, I restate my research questions again, with subquestions to further tease out the concepts: 1. Did participants in the Next Stop Design project perceive crowdsourcing as an effective form of online public participation? 54 a. Did participants in the Next Stop Design project perceive that the project exemplified the 11 ideal features of online democratic process (accessible, free of censorship, autonomous, accountable and relevant, transparent, equal and responsive, pluralistic, inclusive, informed, public, and facilitated)? b. Did participants in the Next Stop Design project perceive that the project lacked any of the 11 ideal features of online democratic process? 2. Why did individuals participate in the Next Stop Design project? a. What needs do participants seek gratification for? b. How, if at all, are these needs gratified through their participation on the site? c. Which of the nine broad motivators (making money, career advancement, peer recognition, socializing, contributing to a common effort, having fun, passing the time, learning new skills, and self-expression) apply to Next Stop Design participants? In the next chapter, I detail my method for operationalizing these research questions. CHAPTER 3 METHOD Given the discussion of online deliberative democratic process and user motivations in Chapter 2, a methodology I call critical media design may be best for interrogating the effectiveness of online participation tools like Next Stop Design. A critical media design approach is complex and multimethod, a series of studies both quantitative and qualitative that come together to make a larger claim about a new media case. To this end, I focused on qualitative online interviews in this study to make a substantial contribution to the overall critical media design approach of Next Stop Design. This chapter details the method, interviewing via instant messenger, for how the study addresses the overarching research questions concerning public participation and motivation stated in the previous chapters. It begins with a discussion of applied communication research and critical inquiry to put forth a rationale for a critical media design approach to this study. Next, a discussion of the Next Stop Design case, which is the vehicle for this study, and a summary of the basic findings from that case provide needed context for an explanation of the study's design. The final portion of this chapter focuses on the utility of interviewing online, a description of participant recruitment procedures, an interview guide to operationalize concepts related to research questions, and a discussion of transcript coding procedures. 56 Applied Communication Research and Critical Media Design The way Buddenbaum and Novak (2001) describe it, the distinction between basic research and applied research is that the goal of the former is "to create, test, and improve theory" while the goal of the latter is "to provide solutions to real-world problems" (p. 14). To be fair, Buddenbaum and Novak (2001) ultimately resist neatly containing these two approaches to social scientific research in such simple definitions, and eventually they argue that the two approaches ought to "complement each other, working together to enhance understanding" (p. 14). Yet, there is much more to be said about the complex interplay between theory building and applied work in social scientific inquiry, particularly when this interplay serves humanistic, critical ends. Hickson (1973) asserted a definition for applied communications research in the inaugural issue of the journal by the same name: "the investigation of human communication events by a participant/observer of those events into a communication artifact that will help bring about communico-social change" (p. 3). That is, a researcher ought to "be, simultaneously, actor, observer, and critic" in relation to his or her research subjects (all the while acknowledging his or her subjectivity); must report findings in a way that non-scholars can understand and benefit from; and ought to strive for improving some aspect of the world through his or her work (Hickson, 1973, pp. 3-4). Following this definition, Tesch (1975) seems to refer to this kind of research not so much as applied, but as humanistic, adding also that such research should not claim to be generalizable and that it should be undertaken when the urgency of a problem does not allow for rigorous scientific research or other methodological considerations. No matter the label, this brand 57 of inquiry is primarily problem-driven and concerned with real communicative interactions rather than hypothetical scenarios or laboratory situations. Because of the primacy of the problem in the design of applied communication studies, there tends to be a drive to select issues or problems first, usually coupled with research sites or texts or events, and then to select appropriate methods for tackling the problem at hand. Applied research then tends to be inductive rather than deductive, making sense from the data that emerge in the course of understanding the problem being investigated and developing solutions for bringing about change. And as these research practices cobble together cohesive theories of human communication, we come to know the greater project of applied communication research as often akin to grounded theory (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990, 1997). The notions of problem solving, connecting research with nonscholars, and working to change the world for the better through communication research resonates with the mantra of critical theory as well. Critical communication research, with its roots in the Frankfurt School, Marxism, feminism, and other schools of thought, is concerned with injustice and imbalances of power in the world-often in consideration of historical material conditions and along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers-and seeks to intervene in such unjust discourses and practices. I am both a committed critic in this sense and an applied communication researcher, and thus, coupled with an interest in the power of media to play a role in such critical intervention, I seek to practice a form of what I call critical media design in my work. Critical media design can best be explained as a theorem synthesizing the concepts presented so far in this chapter: 58 If: • A researcher embraces a critical purpose (a desire to improve the world) in/through his or her work; • A researcher assumes the role of media in constructing our social reality and thus also a role in contributing to unjust conditions in the world; • A researcher values the importance of media as tools for social change; and • New technologies increasingly enable everyday citizens to take charge of the media production process and design messages for themselves; Then: • Researchers can develop research programs that work to create original media processes and products that improve the world. These media processes and products can be the basis for, and the results of, a carefully crafted, iterative, grounded, and applied series of communication studies. I acknowledge the irony in eschewing deductive reasoning in favor of inductive research methods, only to offer a rationale for what I see as a preferred approach to inductive communication research through the deductive logic of a theorem. Still, this theorem neatly sums up my take on critical media design. Communication researchers, then, ought to conceive of themselves not only as students of mediated communicative phenomena, but also as designers of the very mediated environments they study. Scholars in related disciplines, such as Noveck (2003), Fischer (2002), Cross (2001), Illich (1973), and Mau (2004), have also called for design-minded research programs; the roots of design thinking as a part of applied social research can be traced at least back to Mumford (1934) and Buckminster Fuller (1963, 59 1992); and early figures in computing encouraged designerly ways of thinking as well (Engelbart, 1962/2003; Licklider, 1960; Nelson, 1974/2003). It is in the vein of critical media design-and all that that phrase entails methodologically-that Next Stop Design was created to understand the attitudes and communicative actions of citizens in an online public participation context. Next Stop Design as Research Site Based on preliminary case study research on the crowdsourcing model and focused on the problem of trying to increase public participation in transit planning, Thomas W. Sanchez, Keith Bartholomew, and I secured funding through the U.S. Federal Transit Administration's Public Transportation Participation Pilot Program (#2008-DOT-FTA- PTPP) to develop a Web site to test crowdsourcing in transit planning. The scope of the project was at the neighborhood scale, to try to solicit designs and ideas for bus stop shelters. With cooperation from the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), the site selected for the bus stop design project, named Next Stop Design, was a major transfer stop on Campus Center Drive (the "Business Loop") in the heart of the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City. This section of the university campus is experiencing substantial construction and renovation, undergoing a major transformation for the next several years, making this particular bus stop an appropriate test case for the Next Stop Design project in the opinion of UTA. On the Next Stop Design Web site, at www.nextstopdesign.com, participants were presented with a variety of options for engagement with the project, as seen in Figure 1. Because we sought ideas from a crowd of participants through the Web site and wanted participants to vet the ideas of their peers in a simple voting scheme, our project 60 Figure 1. Screen capture of the Next Stop Design home page. !!! 't.2 0..,g.~ :; ::~~ Z ~:;"'~u~c c;I "' "3: u": c: .. - 1":rci.;;.g~E VI .. o_c...cc UJ t;"":;::-= OJ.~ - 0 ' "" '" :I:."..c<= 0. .=;..2: ~ .~ "'_ ~ O ~~ t g ;; §c. :;; .~~]!c.~1i W~ :'S 1OJ :'g":, i~ "::";~ Z .c. :~...c.:c:~lE.:,:c-°;";;- • 0 .o '"" ·00 ! '•m.•• •• 'z' ~o' oa<·izi° .0' • 0 • • I " • ,,,! • •, " I VI ! w , ~ Q , 0. , • 0 , • 0 ~ • l- •e ••3 VI 0 z • ~ • 1 . I- • :; -~ >W< "~ Ii l013il i~l~~~ 0 ~ Z z 61 was clearly one of ideation, or idea generation, and the nature of the vetting process was to identify the popular design choice, or the one the market would support. As an ideation problem solving apparatus, the Web site was designed in the image of other peer-vetted creative production crowdsourcing applications, such as Threadless. Like at Threadless, participants could inform themselves about the nature of the challenge and the complexity of the actual bus stop location by reading information on the Web site. Then, they could design a bus stop shelter and upload the image to the Web site. From there, the image would enter a gallery with other designs and participants could cast a single vote for each design on a simple five-star voting scale, as seen in Figure 2. Participants could also leave comments on individual designs in the gallery, and a separate space on the Web site existed for participants to post other written comments and ideas about the competition or bus stop shelter design in general. In the design process, participants were encouraged through the information provided on the Web site to consider a variety of factors for bus stop shelters in Salt Lake City, including weather variations, safety, lighting, accessibility for people with mobility impairments, and other issues. In order to submit designs to the Web site, comment on others' designs, or vote, participants were required to register a username on the Web site. Registration was free and required a valid e-mail address. By registering on the Web site, participants executed a waiver of informed consent by clicking through a screen with standard wording, a process approved by University of Utah Institutional Review Board study #IRB00033913. On the registration form, participants were asked for their name, location (city, state, ZIP code, country), and e-mail address, as well as to create a unique username and password for the Web site, which would be used to identify them to others on the 62 Figure 2. Screen capture of a design entry's page, with voting and commenting tools. II) w a 0. o l­II) I>w<­Z ! ,! • z "<II W C " <II !;l "' If 0- " w .0.: ~ ili a • • o , .o ~ § , • ! ! o o < 63 site. A basic demographic and transit use survey rounded out the registration form. These questions asked participants their race/ethnicity; how often, why, and for what purposes they used public transportation; whether they had ever previously attended a traditional public meeting or contacted someone to give their opinions on urban planning issues; and how they heard about the Next Stop Design competition. The last checkbox on the form asked whether the participant would be willing to be contacted by researchers for a follow-up interview at a later date. Participants were required to activate a confirmation link sent to their e-mail address in order to begin as a registered user on the Web site. The competition ran for a total of 16 weeks, launching June 5 and closing September 25, 2009. Basic Findings from Next Stop Design Google Analytics scripts were appended to each page of the Next Stop Design Web site. These scripts, a free service of Google, allowed the research team to track basic traffic and user data on the site, such as the numbers of visitors; pages viewed; referring sites, search engines, and search keywords; and geographic location of visitors. Like even the most expensive and sophisticated analytics packages, Google Analytics is imperfect, but it provided perhaps the best available approximation of user behavior on the Web site. Analytics scripts are imperfect in that a very small percentage of Web users employ script-blocking software on their Web browsers or use browsers that do not support scripting, which prevent the analytics service from tracking the user on the Web site. However, only a relatively small number of all Web users, estimated at about 5% in January 2008 ("Browser Statistics," n.d.), use browsers that block or do not support scripting. Google Analytics also has a number of quirks with its geographic location 64 tracking that separates distinct national subdivisions from parent countries for discrete tracking. For instance, Guam and Puerto Rico are tracked as separate from the U.S., Taiwan and Hong Kong are tracked as separate from China, Greenland and the Faroe Islands are tracked as separate from the Kingdom of Denmark, and so on. Based on information provided by Google Analytics, Table 1 describes Next Stop Design's basic site traffic data. Based on information provided by participants in the registration process, Table 2 describes Next Stop Design's registered users. In sum, visitors to the Web site spent a substantial amount of time on the site, at more than 10 pages viewed per visit. General activity on the site-site traffic, number of registered users, number of votes cast, and number of designs submitted-far exceeded the initial expectations of the research team. Cheating in the contest was a major concern. It was discovered that fully 27.6% of all votes cast in the competition were a result of a handful of users who had created several dummy accounts. A rigorous method for determining fraudulent accounts and votes, which included examining voting patterns and geographic locations of IP addresses, led to the deletion of those accounts and votes to arrive at a legitimate ranking of winners in the competition. A mostly young and White crowd participated, consistent with demographics of the most active Internet users and content producers (Fox, 2005; Jones & Fox, 2009; Lenhart, Horrigan, & Fallows, 2004; Lenhart & Madden, 2005). Participants were mostly regular bus riders with a lack of prior participation in public planning activities. International participation was impressive, but it was potentially problematic considering the Utah focus of the competition. Utah participation was relatively low. This was perhaps a result of a lack of Utah media coverage of the project and a lack of Utah 65 Table 1 Basic traffic data from Next Stop Design Basic Site Traffic Site visits 29,855 Page views 316,141 (10.6 pages viewed per visit) Site Visits by Geography Countries/territories visiting 127 Top countries in terms of visitors U.S. (16,045 visits; 53.7% of all visits) U.K. (1,920 visits; 6.4% of all visits) India (1,174 visits; 3.9% of all visits) Greece (991 visits; 3.3% of all visits) Canada (897 visits; 3.0% of all visits) U.S. states visiting 50 (plus D.C.) Top U.S. states in terms of visitors N