The Crowdsourced City: OpenBudgets in Anti-Rival Cities
Matthew Hall Organizations like google have already made the jump to the networked world, this may be an obvious statement but I mean this in a specific way. Google gains strengths form its users, the community or crowd builds their organization just by using their search engine. What this means for Google is that their product is an “anti-rival good,” which means that the more people use their product the better the product becomes (Weber 2004, 78, 154). If you think about it, cities could be the same way. In their current forms, municipal governments have rival goods, meaning they offer services to citizens, like Tim O’Reilly calls it “vending machine” government, and the more services people use the less capability the city has to offer them. Services are depleted by their use and this spirals into an unsustainable problem where city services can never catch up to citizen demands. This paints a bleak picture but if cities can make the leap that google has then they can turn city services into anti-rival goods.
The key to this transformation is universal reporting to create massive collective intelligence. Google achieves constant reporting by making it the default, so every user reports on what they search for, visit, and link to, therefore, making every individual in their community of users constant reporters on the various locations within their community. Cities could do a similar thing by engaging their community of users to constantly report on the quality of services, how they use them, what services are required, and in exactly what capacity. They can also report on whether required services are being provided and in what quality. There are several social media tools that are already facilitating these functions: transportation routes can be analyzed by geotagged tweets, restaurants and retail usage can be analyzed by foursquare check ins and reviews. Most of the tools required to transform cities into anti-rival goods are already in common usage, just not for this direct purpose. OpenBudgeting is not something separate from this discussion, instead it is a part of the same interconnected web of constant reporting, communication, and collaboration. This is the same as how the government should not be considered a separate entity but instead interconnected with the other members of the community. A critical aspect of budgeting processes, especially participatory programs, is informing decision makers about the details and performance of projects (Participatory Budgeting, 38). Crowdsourced reporting combined with citysourced data in collaborative reports would be an invaluable resource for informing citizen decision makers. Usually in participatory programs the government supplies citizens with the information they base their decisions on, which makes those processes vulnerable to corruption and manipulation. Crowdsourced reporting by the people who use city services on a daily basis would provide truly open data (both quantitative and qualitative, since reviews could be a large part of citizen reporting) that is more resilient to corruption and manipulation, while also being more accurate and relevant. It would be impossible for any closed organization to replicate the data gathering attributes of a massive population, just like it would be impossible for Google to gather the quality and quantity of data that they crowdsource from their users.