An Analysis of the Social Process in Ideas Generation for Public Policies

Governments are moving toward developing crowdsourcing communities that facilitate ideas for public policies from a large "crowd." Although this concept is promising, little is known about individuals' actions and behaviors when generating ideas within online communities in a public policy consultation setting. Previous research has shown that online crowdsourcing can generate innovation because of the interactive and diverse nature of the Internet. Building on existing theories and empirical findings, we suggest that the likelihood of proposing valuable ideas within an online community is positively correlated with boundary-spanning activities and feedback received. The Open Government Dialogue, which is an early consultation platform for the open government initiative, is used as an empirical case in which contributors conducted boundary-spanning activities and posted ideas that the government found valuable to include in the policy agenda. However, the amount of feedback and attention received from other members of the community do not show significant effects on the likelihood that a contributor proposes valuable ideas. Furthermore, for repeat contributors, the likelihood of proposing valuable ideas to the government consultation is positively related to prior success but negatively related to the number of ideas posted. Such findings provide implications for public administrators to understand how to design a public consultation platform that encourages contributors to generate usable and valuable ideas and avoids exploitation from people who seek to use the platform for personal gain.