Intelligence and Information Gathering Through Deliberative Crowdsourcing

The hollowing of the state has added new challenges for administrators attending to the competing values of the administration. This article examines how the wisdom of the crowds can be used in a deliberative manner to extract new knowledge through crowdsourcing. We will specifically examine cases of intelligence and information gathering through the analysis of a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria and the use of the crowd in mapping unknown or rapidly changing environments. Through case analysis, this article seeks to understand if crowdsourcing can offer a potential opportunity for public managers to reduce transactions costs while engaging the crowd in a form of deliberative governance to understand and potentially solve public problems. Our approach involves applying the seven lessons of deliberative governance (Scott, Adams, & Wechsler, 2004) to our cases in order to produce five administrative concepts for creating mini-publics for deliberative crowdsourcing.