The Limits of Civic Crowdsourcing

Andres Monroy-Hernandez has an interesting piece over at ReadWriteWeb about the limits of civic crowdsourcing, using the Mexican drug war as his prime example.

Monroy-Hernandez is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His bottom line is that technological innovations can assist civic reform but they can’t be the reform itself. That requires strong institutions.

In other words, text messages to police about drug activity in a particular neighborhood won’t do any good if the police are too intimidated to do anything about it or are being paid to turn a blind eye. This is essentially another version of the old get-the-incentives right problem with crowdsourcing or any other sort of civic participation. If people don’t see any benefits they won’t pitch in and they certainly won’t stick their necks out.

Monroy-Hernandez makes one very interesting side argument: Crowdsourced crime reports, even if they’re encrypted six different ways, can still endanger the reporter if the criminal does a little detective work. The number of possible witnesses to most criminal activity is usually relatively small, after all, and as Monroy-Hernandez notes “when terror is your business, getting it wrong doesn’t matter as much.”

This is an important observation for many other programs to crowdsource tips about crime or wrongdoing.