Leveraging Collective Intelligence of Online Users for Productive Outcomes

The widespread of and advances in information and communication technologies, especially the proliferation of smartphones, have resulted in an exponential growth in the use of crowdsourcing and opened up a new era of citizen science. Crowdsourcing is a term which refers to the collection of large volumes of data or reports on certain events by making use of the geographical dispersion of people, and it gives governments the opportunity to access citizens as a source of knowledge and to collaborate with them. Through crowdsourcing solutions citizens can collectively create public information and take part in public policy processes. Crowdsourcing technology thus offers exciting possibilities for local governments which can take advantage of citizen knowledge to find solutions to various public management problems. This paper provides insight into the implementation process of a crowdsourcing solution developed and deployed in the Czech Republic to deal with such problems. Using the case study of the crowdsourcing smartphone application ZmapujTo, we illustrate how crowdsourcing can be used as a social mapping tool not only to reduce the number of illegal landfills but also to deal with other civic issues. It demonstrates how participatory crowdsourcing solutions represent an innovative contribution in knowledge management and public policy making, and it discusses how collective intelligence of online communities can be leveraged in the public sector.