Crowdsourced policymaking is an increasingly common digital application of participatory democracy in which local and national governments engage citizens and gather ideas and knowledge for improving a policy. Governments use crowdsourcing to achieve two primary goals: (1) to develop better policies by leveraging citizens’ knowledge and insights and (2) to promote civic engagement. Crowdsourcing can help to incorporate non-experts, local knowledge, and new perspectives into the policymaking process and arguably has the potential to make policymaking more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative. National governments around the world have opened up legislative reforms to public participation, and local governments, such as cities and municipalities, have invited their residents to contribute to urban planning processes. Crowdsourced policymaking creates spaces for crowdsourced deliberation, which is an asynchronous, distributed, and self-selected form of deliberation, which provides several advantages to traditional “mini-publics” approach in deliberation. In this talk, I will discuss the productive and challenging role of disagreement in crowdsourced deliberation.

Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Tanja examines, designs, and deploys new media technologies for informing, empowering, and connecting people. She studies the impact of new media technologies on people's behavior and society. These technologies include crowdsourcing, virtual and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence applied in journalism and democratic processes. Previously Tanja worked at Stanford, UC Berkeley and Oxford.

Join the event on Wednesday 9.2.2022 from 16-18 EET through this link!