There is growing interest in the use of information and communication technologies for community engagement and for crowd-sourcing solutions to difficult problems through challenges and prizes. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations are being encouraged to design, deploy, manage and support appropriate online platforms to address both goals and improve economic competitiveness. These governance challenge platforms can create novel pathways for citizen participation, increase openness of governance activities, and increase both the effectiveness and legitimacy of the governing organization. Arizona State University is developing a new University-wide challenge platform to enhance community engagement and to solicit ideas from its 50,000-member University community to solve eight broad challenges, but little is known about the design, use and effects of such platforms.
The research team will engage the platform design team to incorporate the affordances required to improve the overall user experience and to test applicable theories of team composition, governance structures, legitimacy, and team capacity and commitment. Once these features have been developed, they will be used in a series of field studies designed to identify theoretical extensions and potential boundary conditions in online community engagement. The studies will initially map community participation, trace how participation spreads through the community, and test the effects of real-time feedback on the community?s participation patterns. The next phase will explore the impact of voting mechanisms on community dynamics, on perceptions of governance accountability, and on more sophisticated forms of community involvement. Finally, relationships between team formation, structure, diversity and effectiveness will be investigated focusing on the quality of the solutions generated.
Project Summary: This project sought to build upon the growing interest in the use of Internet platforms using challenges and prize to encourage community engagement and use crowdsourcing to generated solutions to difficult governance problems. These "governance challenge platforms" can create generate novel forms of citizen participation, increase the openness of governance, and increase both the effectiveness and legitimacy of the governing organization. Arizona State University has developed a new University-wide challenge platform to enhance community engagement and to solicit ideas from its 50,000-member University community and the broader public. 10,000 Solutions (http://10000Solutions.org) is a participatory challenge platform designed to solicit solutions in eight challenge categories: education; technology; communities; sustainability; economy; health; human rights; and discovery. The first iteration, launched in 2012, was designed as a competition that asked the public to propose entrepreneurial solutions to social issues. More than 2,100 solutions were collected from a diversity of participants ranging from local high school students to leaders of national organizations. The first year culminated in the 10,000 Solutions Showcase on October 9, 2012 where participants selected a grand prize winner from 20 finalist groups. The winner of the $10,000 grand prize, SafeSIPP, developed a technology to address transportation and purification of drinking water in the developing world. Building on the success of this experience the second iteration of 10,000 Solutions, launched in September 2013, has been redesigned to allow different types of groups to communicate, collaborate, and co-create online regardless of their physical distance. It has been redesigned as an open platform where participants can propose and share entrepreneurial ideas as well as host or participate in challenges or actions that improve the community. The new many-to-many platform design enables public participation in the virtual and physical world oriented towards creating a community that contributes both to the development and implementation of ideas that improve the social good. While the number of platforms such as 10,000 Solutions has grown in recent years, little is known about the design, use and effects of such platforms. The research team supported by this NSF grant worked closely with the platform design team to incorporate the features that could improve the overall user experience and to test applicable theories of team composition, governance structures, legitimacy, and team capacity and commitment. These features were then used in a series of field studies designed to identify theoretical extensions and potential boundary conditions in online community engagement using a challenge platform. These studies looked at the mapping of community participation, traced how participation spreads through the community, and tested the effects of real-time feedback on the community’s participation patterns. Later phases explored the impact of voting mechanisms on community dynamics, on perceptions of governance accountability and enhanced community involvement. Finally, relationships between team formation, structure, diversity and effectiveness were investigated focusing on the quality of the solutions generated. Research and Education Activities: Our work has focused on (a) studying the patterns of use and participation on the platform over time, (b) running computer simulations studying network dynamics of groups with different compositions and interests, and (c) preparing for a redesign of the 10,000 Solutions platform that launched in September 2013 and increased functionality and provides a wider array of activities that can occur simultaneously on the platform. 10,000 solutions was also used during the project period as a interactive example and activity for undergraduate and graduate courses in Public Administration. The research team coordinated a National Science Foundation workshop to explore the research and practice of participatory platforms with a public intent. Participants included scholars; practitioners from all levels of government, including the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and U.S. Department of Energy; practitioners from the private sector; platform participants; and students from throughout the country. This workshop created a foundation for understanding the role, function, and places for improvement for participatory platforms in the public sector. Findings: Through this work, knowledge on platform dynamics has been advanced. Through our computer simulations, we have found that in an awareness network of two participant groups there is greater participation in one group has interacted with a solution from the other group or commented or a common solution. Designing an experimental pilot provided insights in how the expertise of scholars from different disciplines can be combined to enhance research questions and operational design. A comprehensive framework has been developed that charts participatory platform lifecycles and design characteristics to provide a foundation from which to pursue the systematic study and successful practice of participatory platforms.
