Could crowdsourcing expertise be the future of government?

Beth Noveck in the Guardian: “We lack public institutions – a participatory bureaucracy and open parliamentary processes – that know how to tap into the collective intelligence of our communities, and draw power from the participation of the many, rather than the few.
It is the absence of these open institutions, and the resulting failure to take account of the views, voices and know-how of the many disaffected people who voted – and those who did not – during the EU referendum and the US presidential election, which create a vacuum that charismatic demagogues end up filling….
Of course, the new US administration is not alone in a pervasive contempt for expertise. “We’ve had enough of experts” said Michael Gove infamously, with recent – and not very comforting – qualification that he was targeting “a sub-class of experts, particularly economists, pollsters, social scientists.” And though there are profound differences between events in the US, UK, Hungary, Austria and France, all display a common thread of anti-elitist, anti-establishment sentiment….
Citizen engagement is largely confined to elections, opinion polls or jury service – asking people what they feel, not what they know and can do – even though democracy should be rule by, for and with the people.
However, this dichotomy between equality and expertise, between democracy and professionalism, is false….
So how do we link this distributed expertise to governing? How do we create more participatory institutions?… online tools are making it possible for institutions systematically to get more diverse help and more members of the public to participate in problem solving, by sharing their knowledge and skills…
For all forms of engagement to be more effective – whether driven top-down or bottom-up – we need to move to smarter crowdsourcing, which uses technology to make opportunities to participate more visible, and integrates them into how decisions get made….(More)”
This article is based on Beth Noveck’s 2016 Campaign for Social Science/SAGE annual lecture,the full text of which is available here.