Crowdsourcing: A New Way to Citizen Empowerment

Empowerment has for a long time held a prominent place in the theoretical development of fields as diverse as development studies, community psychology or studies on social movements and organisations, among other areas. In parallel, multilateral agencies and non-profit organizations have launched empowerment processes in different sociocultural and political contexts with an uneven impact. On the other hand, the advance of Web 2.0 technologies has allowed crowdsourcing to establish itself as one of the most successful collaborative approaches through the internet, particularly in the business world. In this chapter the authors present a definition of the concept empowerment-oriented crowdsourcing on the basis of the review of the theoretical and practical developments of both dynamics. The objective is to delineate the framework that facilitates the implementation of processes of citizen empowerment through crowdsourcing projects that seek social benefit. Álvarez Sánchez, D.; Pardo Gimilio, D.; Isnardo Altamirano, J. (2015). Crowdsourcing: A New Way to Citizen Empowerment. En Advances in Crowdsourcing. Springer. 73-86. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-18341-1_6 Aitamurto, T. (2012). Crowdsourcing for democracy: A new era in policy-making. Committee for the Future, Parliament of Finland. http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Crowdsourcing_for_DemocracyF_www.pdf . Accessed October 4, 2014. Antorini, Y. M., Muñiz, A. M., & Askildsen, T. (2012). Collaborating with customer communities: Lessons from the LEGO Group. MIT Sloan Management Review, 53(3), 73–79. Brabham, D. C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: an introduction and cases. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14, 75–90. doi: 10.1177/1354856507084420 . Brabham, D. C. (2009). Crowdsourcing the public participation process for planning projects. Planning Theory, 8, 242–262. doi: 10.1177/1473095209104824 . Burger-Helmchen, T., Pénin, J. (2010). The limits of crowdsourcing inventive activities: What do transaction cost theory and the evolutionary theories of the firm teach us? In Working Papers of BETA (Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée), Strasbourg, France. Chesbrough, H. (2003). Open innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Estellés, E., & González, F. (2012a). Clasificación de iniciativas de crowdsourcing basada en tareas. El Profesional de la Información, 21(3)