Introduction to the Special Issue on Crowdlaw and Emergency Collective Intelligence

Crowdsourcing governance in general, and crowdlaw in particular, are very promising and much-needed strategies to improve the way we govern our democratic societies and solve our public problems. They may strengthen the quality of public decision-making and lawmaking by relying on the power of collective intelligence, while they may increase their democratic legitimacy by widely engaging the public in multiple ways in ordinary governance. In the past 15 years, the literature on crowdsourcing governance and management has exploded (i.e., Howe [2006], Felstiner [2011], Estellés-Arolas and González L. Guevara [2012], Brabham [2013], Oddsdottir [2014], Bott, Gigler and Young [2014], Landemore [2015], Christensen, Karjalainen and Nurminen [2015], Lodge and Wegrich [2015], Kietzmann [2016], Bruckner [2016], Hosio et al. [2016], Orozco [2016], Wazny [2017], Ranchord and Voermans [2017], Aitamurto and Chen [2017], Schwartz [2018], Horton [2018], Logan [2020], Liu [2021], and Franzoni et al. [2021]). While crowdsourcing originally referred to the ability of large numbers of people to converge on the right answer through the law of large numbers, such as when guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, the term crowdsourcing has been used indiscriminately as a synonym for engagement of all kinds and, hence, lacks analytical rigor for helping public actors to understand how to design effective and legitimate uses of public participation. There has, therefore, been a need for terminology to describe, more specifically, the designs, processes, and outcomes of online participation in lawmaking processes. As the CrowdLawManifesto—signed by a group of scholars and experts on public governance in 2018—explains: “CrowdLaw is any law, policy-making or public decision-making that offers a meaningful opportunity for the public to participate in one or multiple stages of decision-making, including but not limited to the processes of problem identification, solution identification, proposal drafting, ratification, implementation, or evaluation. CrowdLaw draws on innovative processes and technologies and encompasses diverse forms of engagement among elected representatives, public officials, and those they represent.”¹ Such participation goes beyond the guessing of crowdsourcing and involves more complex and interesting forms of data collection, collective action, collaboration, codesign and cocreation that describe how institutions are turning to collective intelligence to make decisions [Noveck 2018; Alsina and [Martí 2018].

Just as interest in crowdlaw was burgeoning, however, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic called into question the ability of institutions to take advantage of public engagement during times of crisis at all. The pandemic triggered important questions that we seek to answer with this Special Issue: What are the public engagement, collective intelligence, and crowdlaw instruments and strategies that we can apply in times of crisis? Is engagement even possible or is governance by technocratic means preferable? How do we design rapid forms of information gathering and collective action that fit with the pace of an emergency? The articles in this volume conclude that not only is crowdlaw possible during an emergency, it is also often preferable. In articles that are both theoretically rigorous and replete with practical examples, they show, from a variety of perspectives and disciplines—such as computing engineering, political and social innovation, political science, political philosophy, and law, among others—that crowdlaw and crowdsourced public solutions may be fundamental in times of emergency. They may let governments and public administrations benefit from what we might call “emergency collective intelligence,” namely, the need for distributed information and collective action to inform decision-making during times when normal information-gathering channels and analysis are not possible. This issue has a companion online course, where several of the authors from this issue have contributed videos to explain how to implement collective intelligence and crowdlaw strategies in times of crisis: https://covidcourse.thegovlab.org/.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we approach many economic, social, cultural, and, of course, political issues. Governments, legislatures, administrations, agencies, and courts have had to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, urgency, and public pressure. There was a great temptation to resort to even more technocratic, top-down, closed-behind-doors procedures. Indeed, many governments chose to hire expensive management consultants to manage governance during the pandemic. However, as the articles in this issue explain, it is precisely in times of emergency, uncertainty, and urgency when collective intelligence and mechanisms of crowdlaw may serve better their purposes of organizing a more efficient, more effective, and more legitimate legislation and public decision-making. No government, no scientific or expert committee, no legislature can know every piece of relevant information, especially when on-the-ground conditions are rapidly shifting. Relevant information, resources of different kinds, good ideas, and even creative solutions, are distributed across the society and can emerge from the right combination of many and plural perspectives. From operational awareness to epidemiologic monitoring and surveillance, collective intelligence improves operational awareness. Experts with extensive experience in emergency and crisis management confirm that the use of new technology to enable distributed information gathering and action can strengthen public decision-making.

This Special Issue contributes to our understanding of the role of collective intelligence in a crisis. It brings together a select group of scholars and experts to explore crowdlaw and emergency collective intelligence from different disciplines with a very concrete two-fold mission: (a) taking stock of all the knowledge accumulated in the areas of crowdlaw and collective intelligence and apply it to concrete circumstances of emergency, like the ones we are living in; and (b) propose very concrete lines of action-oriented research to explore how the academy may contribute to helping public institutions improve and strengthen emergency management and crisis decision-making.

Geoffrey Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, author of one of the most important books in the literature on collective intelligence [Mulgan 2018], and former Chief Executive of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). He is one of the world's leading experts on social and political innovation. He opens this Special Issue with an article entitled “Government as a Brain: How can governments better understand, think, create and remember, and avoid the traps of collective stupidity both in emergencies and normal times.” Mulgan analyzes different components of the idea of collective intelligence when applied to governments, such as their capacity for observation, for making models, for being creative, for recording and remembering information and for being empathic with citizens, and even for developing judgment and wisdom. He gives several examples that illustrate each of these capacities in times of emergency. Two additional important challenges are addressed in this article: one is how to link such abilities of smart governments with the design and implementation of strategy; the other is how to bring collective intelligence beyond national borders to global governance. In sum, national governments and global institutions of governance may be seen as a brain that, when adequately designed and function properly, are capable of thinking, deciding, and acting with intelligence. The alternative, of course, would be for them to fall into the traps of stupidity, and this is something we cannot afford, either in normal times or in times of emergency.

Angela O. Lungati is a technologist, community builder, and open-source software activist. She is member of the Creative Commons Board of Directors—based in Kenya—and the Executive Director of Ushahidi, one of the most successful online platforms for data sharing and crowdsourcing, which has been used in several initiatives, most of them in situations of emergency or crisis. Lungati's article has a long title that summarizes her key insight “Data sharing and information platforms in crisis response and preparedness. Exploring the role of open data sharing platforms and collective intelligence in COVID-19 response efforts, and preparedness for future pandemics.” In this article, Lungati presents and analyzes two successful community-led initiatives that have used the Ushaidi software to generate a collective intelligence response to the COVID-19 crisis: Frena la curva (FLC), in Spain, and the crowdsourced map developed by Safecast using Ushaidi to allow people to document their COVID-19 testing experiences. These two examples illustrate how distributed knowledge and information across the population and efforts to coordinate collective intelligence may be very helpful to governments in deciding how to respond to a crisis. In addition to these case studies, Lungati argues that, despite the constant warnings during the past decades about the real possibility of a pandemic, governments were not well prepared to deal with the COVID-19 emergency, and wonders what we can learn from previous outbreaks and crises and, more specifically, how data sharing technologies might critically help us improve our preparedness and the effectiveness of our responses.

Hollie Russon Gilman is a political scientist, advisor, and civic strategist leading the Participatory Democracy Project. She is Fellow at the New America's Political Reform Program and co-author with Sabeel Rahman of Civic Power, a bold contribution to the literature on how to empower grassroots movements to revitalize democracy in a period of crisis [Rahman and Russon Gilman 2018]. She is also Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Columbia University World Projects Fellow, and closely linked with our interests here, she has served as member of the Advisory Board on Tech and Ethics of the COVID Alliance. In this Special Issue, Russon Gilman contributes an article entitled “Building Civic Power in Crisis,” in which she focuses on how COVID-19 has revealed even more blatantly the inequities and injustices that devastate the United States and analyzes how different strategies to empower civic community movements may have a critical role, not only in strengthening our democracies, but also in improving their responses to crisis situations. She argues that two main changes are required to build civic power: first, changing the way social movements and communities self-organize; and second, finding strategies to institutionalize such civic power. Russon Gilman examines different practical examples of crowdlaw as critical tools for producing those changes and thus for building the civic power that our democracies need, from CovidWatcher, How We Feel, Coworker.org, and other community-led initiatives in New York City, Kansas, or Washington DC, among other places in the US, to experiences in Bologna (Italy), York (UK), and Santiago de Cali (Colombia). She also analyzes myriad case studies that particularly illustrate how crowdlaw may work very well in times of crises, in places such as New York City, Seattle, Baltimore, and Miami, among others. In addition, she focuses on cases of participatory budgeting as a particularly suitable strategy to empower civic movements. And her contribution ends with a very useful list of practical recommendations that we should consider when designing reforms in our democratic governing institutions to make them more effective in dealing with emergencies.

Michael A. Fisher, Senior Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists, Director of the Congressional Science Policy Initiative, and coordinator of the FAS COVID19 Task Force, and his co-author Lindsay K. Milliken, who served as Policy Analyst at the Federation of American Scientists and is currently working as Policy Assistant for Research and Innovation for the delegation of the European Union to the United States, are responsible for the fourth contribution to this Special Issue, entitled “Crowdsourcing science and technology expertise to empower legislative branch oversight and policymaking..” In their article, Fisher and Milliken show that there is a giant gap in the expertise and information that our lawmakers require to do an effective job both in normal times and in cases of emergencies. While most legislators and their staffs are generalists, they very often need specific technical knowledge provided by scientists and technologists but lack proper channels of communication with the external experts they need. Fisher and Milliken present the details about one of the most important recent crowdsourced initiatives worldwide that is trying to fill that gap: the Congressional Science Policy Initiative, launched by the Federation of American Scientists. This Initiative coordinates the efforts of thousands of scientists and technologists that may bring their knowledge in helping the US Congress legislative processes, basically by intervening in Congressional hearings. In the article, they also comment on the COVID19 Task Force initiative, integrated by more than 60 specialists, which provided technical advice to law and policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels in the United States. The article ends with some reflections about how we could remove the existing barriers to the engagement of scientists and experts in all levels of lawmaking and public decision-making, and why this would be critical for not only improving the quality of public decisions but also their legitimacy.

Michael A. Neblo is the Director of the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA), Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University, and co-author (with Kevin Esterling and David Lazer) of the recent book Politics with the People, one of the most important contributions to the literature of participatory democracy [Neblo 2018]. Amy Lee is the Associate Director of IDEA and former program officer of the Kettering Foundation, where she led the platform Common Ground for Action. And Abigail Kielty is a PhD Candidate at Ohio State University. These three outstanding scholars have co-authored the fifth contribution to this Special Issue, the article “Connecting to Congress during COVID-19. Political representation and twoway crisis communication.” In their contribution, Kielty, Lee, and Neblo explain how they quickly adapted the methodology of the Deliberative Town Halls (DTH) that they had been organizing as a way of ensuring close deliberative contact between members of Congress and their constituents due to the restrictions and new urgencies of the COVID19 emergency. Pre-COVID19 DTH used to focus on a single issue and with a single member of Congress, while the emergency adaptation of them, apart from going virtual, tended to gather two members of Congress of two different parties with experts and citizens and engage them in a two-way communicative process. They developed a new framework of policy actions and tradeoffs designed to ensure that the relevant expertise and technical information could reach the members of Congress but also that they could engage in a fruitful discussion with the experts and citizens. In the article, they explain in detail who they organized eight COVID19 DTH and provide information about the citizens’ expectations in those processes as well as the policy proposals and actions that reached more support among them. If close and deliberative two-way communication between members of Congress and their constituents is an essential ingredient of any truly representative system, this article shows how this communication is even more important in times of crisis or emergency and how the new tools of crowdlaw may help to secure that goal.

John Gastil is Distinguished Professor of Communication and Political Science, senior scholar at the McCourtney Institute of Democracy at Pennsylvania State University, and a world top scholar on minipublics and deliberative and participatory democracy, author of several important contributions to the literature on this topic, including his most recent book Hope for Democracy, co-authored with Katherine R. Knobloch [Gastil and Knobloch 2020]. He and his seven co-authors—Chris Anderson, Laura Black, Stephanie Burkhalter, Soo-Hye Han, Justin Reedy, Robert Richards, and John Rountree—sign the sixth contribution to this Special Issue, with the title “Convening a minipublic during a pandemic: A case study on the Oregon Citizens' Assembly Pilot on COVID-19 Recovery.” In this article, this group of political scientists and communication specialists analyze the results of a seven-week pilot online Citizen Assembly organized by the civic organization Healthy Democracy in the State of Oregon (ORCA). This is the same group that has been organizing for 10 years now the Citizen Initiative Reviews (CIR) in the same state of Oregon, which is one of the most stable and well-known examples of minipublics worldwide and a paradigmatic example of crowdlaw. The organization of this ORCA allowed Gastil and his collaborators to study how an organization with long experience in organizing crowdlaw stable and regular initiatives deals with the challenge of organizing another crowdlaw experiment amid an emergency, the first difficulty being, of course, the need to do everything online. And it also gave them the opportunity to survey the participants and compare their views with the views of those who had participated in the regular CIR. Their research reveals several important findings. Perhaps the most important one is that despite the remarkable differences in some respects between CIR and ORCA, a crowdlaw mechanism in the form of a minipublic may easily adapt to an emergency, even if as a result of the crisis face-to-face deliberations become impossible, and also that having experience in organizing ordinary regular minipublics may prove decisive to help dealing with the specific challenges of emergency collective intelligence.

José M. Martínez Sierra is a constitutional lawyer and Director General of the UPF Barcelona School of Management who also holds a Jean Monnet Chair on EU Law and Government and is Faculty Advisor of the Harvard Law School. His article, entitled “Constitutions vs. COVID-19. Crowdlaw as an alternative in crisis and recovery,” is a comparative analysis of the constitutional, legal and political responses to COVID19 given by the governments of United States and Taiwan. Martínez Sierra examines the difficulties that constitutional law and constitutional and supreme courts have in properly distinguishing between ordinary and emergency times, and also in preserving fundamental rights when constitutional mechanisms of exceptionality are activated. From that perspective, and according to him, introducing practices of crowdlaw may help to reduce the eventual lack of legitimacy of some decisions and policies. Based on his analysis of the Taiwanese government's response to the COVID19 crisis, he argues that crowdlaw has proven to be essential to collect distributed knowledge, identify solutions, and test and evaluate policies and public interventions, and thus to be helpful to improve the quality of our public decision-making. Regarding the constitutional accommodation of crowdlaw, Martínez Sierra argues that even if the US Constitution and the Taiwanese Constitution do not explicitly recognize or contain specific crowdlaw mechanisms in the organization and functioning of their respective governments, there is no explicit prohibition of them either, and there is sufficient room for implementing them even in emergencies when the exceptional constitutional mechanisms are activated. Thus, in conclusion, crowdlaw mechanisms would be not only compatible with the constitutional order even in the case of exceptional times, but instrumentally good to strengthen the quality of lawmaking and public decision-making and to reduce the risk of undue restrictions over fundamental rights.

José Luis Martí is a legal and political philosopher and Associate Professor of Law at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona. He has contributed with several research publications to democratic theory, deliberative democracy, political legitimacy, global democracy, and the role of new technologies in strengthening our democratic systems. His article, entitled “Crowdsourcing crisis management and democratic legitimacy,” is the eighth contribution to this Special Issue. Martí examines the apparent dilemma that emerges in exceptional times between the quality and the legitimacy of public decision-making. In emergency situations, when there are severe time constraints, scarce resources, and the stakes are very high, governments may need to give priority to technocratic procedures even if they score lower in terms of democratic legitimacy. At the same time, and precisely because the stakes are very high and emergency public decisions are expected to be more consequential, the reasons for caring about democratic legitimacy are even stronger than those we have in ordinary times. In this article, Martí clarifies the notions of crisis or emergency, quality, and legitimacy of decision-making, and he argues that the dilemma between quality and legitimacy is a false one. He analyzes how crowdlaw and emergency collective intelligence may conciliate both ideals and examines several real examples of crowdsourcing crisis management that may provide evidence of how crowdlaw may also work in extraordinary circumstances.

Peter Bragge is Research Fellow at BehaviourWorkd at Monash Sustainability Institute of Australia. He is a world expert on complex evidence reviews and knowledge translation, especially from medical research to health care services and practices. His article is the ninth and last contribution to this Special Issue and is entitled “From centuries to hours. The journey of research into practice.” According to Bragge, the COVID19 crisis has revealed the striking importance of linking research to practice and policymaking. The great uncertainty that characterized the first weeks and months of this pandemic was increasingly reduced by the progress of scientific research. And yet, writing and publishing scientific findings in journals is not enough if the aim is to allow this expertise to have a real impact in practical governance and decision-making. In this article, Bragge briefly examines the history of researched informed practice and policy. He also analyzes the existing gaps between research and practice and how the idea of knowledge translation and nudges and other behaviour-changing mechanisms may help to fill those gaps. In addition, he focuses on how crises such as the pandemic require a speed in reviewing evidence that is not paralleled in normal times and how crowdsourced systematic and rapid review communities have an important role to play in securing such speed.

If we have learned anything from this pandemic, it is that our institutions are not well prepared to deal with emergencies but also that tech-based collective intelligence approaches can be very helpful to articulate more effective and more legitimate responses to our challenges. These essays, case studies, and experiments described in this Special Issue by some of the most important international experts on collective intelligence, crowdlaw, participatory and deliberative democracy, civic tech, democratic legitimacy, and knowledge translation illuminate why during times of crisis institutions must take advantage of the power of the crowd to gather information and intelligence, take advantage of collective action and the passion and willingness of nonstate actors. If we are to be ready for the next crisis—and there will be several—then we would do well to learn from their experience.